Tony and Friends in Kelloggs Land

You might think wtf. This game was created for promotional use (Advertising) back around 1993 (I forgot the exact date) on Amiga and PC.

The Amiga 3.5" disk version

The business model was adapted by Rauser Advertainment, a follow up company from COMAD. I was Rausers development director back then and single handily produced all his games through remote management using BBS (remember the internet wasn't invented yet).

They basically did create games on all popular formats paid by the ad agency. When finished the company also distributed the game for free, mostly as cover disks or on trade shows. The reach was immense - we could calculate a reach of more than 3 million with the Kelloggs game. Considering how cheap development was back in that time the contact price per customer was much better than any TV commercial - and the user engaged with your product at his free will and much longer!

The game was a jump & run with lots of hidden areas. You played four different characters which were based on the products of Kelloggs and you could switch between them. Each character had specific talents: Tony the Tiger was strong, the Frog could swim and dive, the Toucan could fly and the monkey could climb. Levels where custom designed around those talents.

Of course collecting the cereals enhanced your life which caused a positive relationship between the player and the product. Advertisers loved that kind of games and it caused an entire business to spawn which highlighted in the company Phenomedia and their "Moorhuhn" game. they even went public, betrayed the tax authorities and their CEO's went to jail. Done was the "advertainment" industry.

Link to gameplay vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK4teEOTsFY
Link to the team who created it (now under a different name): http://www.keengames.com/

Thank you to the three awesome talents back then who created it: Peter Thierolf, Jan Jöckel and Anthony Christoolakis.

You want to play it? Germans look here:
http://blog.babeltech.de/2009/09/tony-and-friends-%E2%80%93-in-kellogs-land-portable/

Download file

The Story about "M.U.D.S."

Whenever I refer to that game I need to explain that I don't mean muds (as in Multi User Dungeons) but M.U.D.S. which stands for Mean Ugly Dirty Sports. Yeah we were creative with product names these days :)

As mentioned in previous posts we worked with a team called Golden Goblins. Due to restructurings we moved most of the team to our main offices in Düsseldorf including my favorite artist/creative Hartwig Niedergassel (see previous posts). He was the backbone of the design but note that all team members contributed a lot to the design on that project. Holger, Volker, Hartwig and me were the creative section so to say.

During these days a team was small, so having 2 programmers, one designer/artist and further 2 programmers for the conversion (Gisbert Sigmund for Atari ST, Jörg Prenzing for C64) was luxury and made this project one of the most expensive we did: 500.000 DM (about $250.000). Doesn't sound much but compared to the less than 100.000 we payed for Katakis ...

Anyway this project is another story of "if this went well I would be rich & famous" stories - this time a CEO of Lucas Film was the culprit. Uh oh. Yes, Lucas.

So we started the project. The idea was born as Grand Monster Slam had a large fan base and we wanted to expand on that setting - and we didn't have a sports game. So we came up with the genre mix of team manager & action sports part.

Remember: Games had a resolution of 320x200 these days 

The Campaign Map 

60fps scrolling on PC!

We envisioned one city where you buy your team players on the slave market from various races and you competed against other teams in that city or traveling teams.

The lead format was PC (unusual for those days in Germany) as it was targeted for an US audience. The 2 programmers made wonders happen on PC on the technology side: we were able to do a 60 fps scrolling on the sport action part - on EGA/VGA cards! Awesome during those days. 

When the game was presentable I traveled to the US to show it to partners if we can get a distribution or licensing deal done, the game was designed for an US audience after all. One company loved the game so much they wanted it exclusively - worldwide. The company was Lucas Film Games (now called Lucas Arts, sold to Disney). And let me tell you this: back during the days if Lucas Film wanted you you didn't say no. You simply went for it - all in.

So they assigned a producer to us called Noah Falstein. Yes, that Noah, great guy, creator of Sini Star, Koronos Rift, and the  Indiana Jones adventures! He made really good suggestions and added a campaign to the game: instead of one city we should feature multiple ones, each being a league with the last city being special - the end game, the finals so to say.



That made the product larger than intended and was the primary reason that the game cost 500k in the end. Time was great, working with Lucas was awesome, we even visited the Skywalker Ranch, had a preview of the latest Indiana Jones movie in George Lucas private THX cinema - on the farm. Even saw original light sabers and met Stephen Spielberg. We all were Star Wars fans, so working for the creator took us to new motivation levels we never experienced before.

More screenshots of MUDS: http://hol.abime.net/2528/screenshot

Skywalker Ranch building where the Games department was

All looked well that we, our little German team, were creating the next big hit from Lucas Film Games, worldwide! We would be famous! We could do more games for Lucas! Awesome!
But again fate had a different idea how to proceed in that story.

Lucas Film decided to make their games department a profit center (until then it was not profitable) and changed their name later to Lucas Arts. For that restructuring the CEO at that time cancelled all external projects to save costs - including ours. 

Oh well, shit happens, but we knew that form my prior sales pitch travel to the US we can find another - IF that CEO wasn't keen on saving his image. He was sure MUDS would be a smash hit but was forced to cancel the contract to to economic reasons - so he tried to make sure that no one got the project! He used his connections to tell everyone in the US publishing scene that the title was shit, the team was impossible to work with and the title would never be finished anyway due to technical challenges. I mean, who would touch a title anyway which Lucas Arts cancelled for those reasons?

Yes, he did that. Covered his ass. Made it impossible for us, a German small publisher to sell the title to a major US publisher - by simply spreading lies.

So we only found a minor one (we had Europe covered ourselves). When MUDS shipped on 2 Floppy Disks (1.2 MB total!) in 1990 it sold pretty well, over 86.000 just in Germany. Despite the large budget we proved everyone wrong who claimed MUDS would be a disaster: it was profitable and one of the very profitable games the publisher did - for a long time as it created a huge following and created a wonderful long shelf-life.

MUDS is one of those titles where I still get fan mail today. If you can configure a 32bit DOS Box it still runs today perfectly and the whole game is only a 1.2MB email attachment.

Side Stories: 
We put the whole team and our boss Marc Ullrich as the slave trader into the games slave market where you purchased your team players. Our boss was not amused as this screenshot with his face was very popular in magazines. Btw Teut wasnt that bad of a player in MUDS:

When Lucas switched development leads one of them became a godo friend of mine, Tony Garcia. We still are in contact these days and he had a great career spanning founding Microsoft Games, working at EA and now is Vice President at Unity3d USA.

When we visited SkyWalker Ranch it was forbidden to take any photos  Secretly we took some and were proud to have them with us. But the camera with the film was stolen from our rental car 2 days later :( So no photos exist of our visit :( 

The ceo who told lies about the project had to leave Lucas some time later and vanished into the depth of the industry. I don't even remember his name, but he had a talent selling things.

Thank you Heiko Klinge for remind me: M.U.D.S had digital sound output through the standard speaker. At that times the speaker could do just "beep". MUDS was one of the rare games doing digitized stuff using speaker only as AdLib cards were expensive these days and Sound Blaster not even released.

The story of "Citadel of the Black Sun"

There was a game - if it would have been finished I would be famous - and rich. Here is the story of 1988.

There was a team called Golden Goblins back in Gütersloh who worked for us. Gütersloh is a village roleplaying a city. It is only famous because two large companies are there: Bertelsmann and Miele, otherwise its like a village. Restaurants close after 2pm until the evening, so no food during that time. Awesome!

Rainbow Arts was founded there along with Magic Bytes, two of the first companies in Germany in the game business. Rainbow Arts moved to Düsseldorf but the team stayed in Gütersloh working on a title called Grand Monster Slam.

This title is important later on for M.U.D.S., but that's a different story. Important is the artist, designer, creative multi-talented Hartwig Niedergassel, who worked on it with his specific style.

Remember also that Rainbow Arts distributed a lot of US companies in Germany as we somehow "invented" localisation, no one was doing it at that time. One of the companies we did was SSI, known for their AD&D RPG's "Gold Box Series" like Pool of Radiance. We had a good relationship and at some point they asked us if we could develop a title for them.

So I started prototyping with Hartwig and Heiko Schröder, a technical programmer (with whom I later founded my own company Wings Simulations). The game was PC only, the first title ever Rainbow Arts did only on PC specifically for the US (as Europe was dominated by Amiga/Atari ST).

The RPG's SSI did were top down but with some nice features: party, not single character like Ultima and turn based group combat. We wanted that but move forward with graphics. Back in that time (remember, year 1988) we needed to support 16 color EGA and 16 color VGA. Yes, sixteen. That's 16 ugly colors with two being black and white. The screenshots you'll see will show this. Hartwig was really an artist to get out those great graphics from those colors.

The special things I put into the RPG we wanted to create were unique and not known at that time:

Barby Doll System: I wanted to change the appearance of the characters depending on their armor and weapons they equipped (yes at that time everyone used static pictures). We talk 1988/89 after all:

Isometric Graphics: Most RPG's were top down due to technical reasons (remember no 3d, that came in 1996) but I knew it was possible to trick this as I wanted the system what Knights Lore did on Spectrum: full isometric view:

True Line of Sight and window/door functions

Line of Sight: But I wanted more: I wanted that you can enter all houses and only look inside if you had line of sight. So the inside of houses should be dark unless you peeked though a window or opened a door. Tactical war-games did this already, but in top down 2D.

Heiko made all this possible, he was very good at this stuff. So our game looked like this on the tactical screens or when you entered villages or dungeons: compare this to other RPG's of 1988/1989!

Cow Tipping

Note the black areas where you didn't have line of sight. Also we supported multiple stories of buildings, so you can walk up and down, or even jump out of the window from the 2nd story. The cows also were important: I believe we were the first game to include cow tipping :)

The right side was the function bar, we reduced all functions to a nice menu usable with the mouse. Oh, did I tell you full optional mouse control? That was unique as at that time most PC's didn't have a mouse as windows shipped much later. Most games were keyboard control only.

We also had nice graphics when changing locations. At that time you usually walked on a world map and only showed above detail when you enter locations. Remember 16 colors!

Location Intro Graphics

World Travel of your party

When we showed this game to SSI they were blown away. They immediately wanted it and put it under the AD&D license. We, a small German team, allowed to use the AD&D license AND work for SSI, a great US publisher. Wow, that was unique, a first for Germany. We loved it!

And it even became better: our producer at SSI Nicholas Beliaeff told us that SSI planned to change all their future RPG's to our engine if we finish. All. All AD&D RPG's with our engine. We would be famous!

One of the first games developed in Germany for an US publisher

But the world had different ideas with us.

First one employee of our daughter companies we acquired called Time Warp moved into our offices as we closed down their offices. That guy wanted my job, always working to criticize mine. He said openly he wanted my job he can do it better, and he hated RPG's. He didn't believe in them.

Second I fell in love with the girl friend of my best friend Bernard. Remember? He was one of the three of us managing Rainbow Arts. She and I came together and she split from Bernard, not good when you think the three of us had to work together on a daily basis.

Story short: I left the company due to private reasons (due to my girl friend, later my wife, we married in 1992, but she died on cancer in 2010) and that one guy took over all my projects.

Within three months he split the development team, made sure SSI hated my and the teams guts and the project was cancelled. Remember, he hated RPG's! The game was 70% finished. I can play through the alpha even today which I still have on my machine (I took the screens above from it). All it took is someone to finish the last steps.
But he cancelled it. Made sure SSI's wrath was on me and not him. What an asshole (name changed).

There it goes, a chance in a life time to write computer games history. One of the greatest games I ever did wasted due to an asshole, but I gained a wife in exchange for this and losing a best friend.

But thats not the only time fate destroyed one of such potential projects. I'll write about the other one soon.

Side stories: our first producer at SSI Todd Porter was such a fan of our game that when he left SSI for Origin he put many ideas and concepts from us into their game Knights of Legends.

The "asshole" from above continued being one: he joined a company which invented advertising games, stole their co-ceo and the companies customers and copied that companies business. Weeks later even that co-ceo was fired. The asshole is still CEO of that company and publishes games. And no, even today after all those years I won't accept your Facebook friend request if you read this.

Hartwig Niedergassel continued his great work with MUDS, my largest project at that time. Story to follow.

Heiko Schröder founded Wings Simulations with me in 1996 and was lead programmer on Panzer Elite and Söldner. He now works for Volkswagen as a programmer near Hannover.

Nicholas Beliaeff meanwhile after a great career is Vice President Development of Trion, the publisher of Rift. We are still frends and see each other on international game conferences about once a year - since 25 years!

The Story of "The great Giana Sisters"

As loyal readers of my blog know I joined Rainbow Arts in 1987 because they wanted me to recruit new projects (at this time it was Sarcophaser and Katakis Amiga). I also took over as development director meaning that I was in control of all development, quite a challenge for someone who never did this.

Remember though that at that time there was no best practice or experience to base this job upon. So that time was basically my education: I was allowed to do everything wrong and learn from it, we all did. We were three people leading the company now: Marc Ullrich, founder and Ceo, Bernard Morell in control of production (physical goods) and distribution, and me in charge of game development. I will get back to that trio soon in another blog post.

The really bad but famous Giana Sisters title screen, maybe one of the first female heroines in games

At the time I joined Giana Sisters was already in full production with Thomas Hertzler as programmer and Manfred Trenz as graphic artist (yes the same Manfred who did Katakis & Turrican on C64 later on). The project had like 3 more months to go, at maximum. The only thing I did was QA & Mastering, which was trivial at that time.

(Note: as Hans Ippisch noted the C64 original was created by Armin Gessert as programmer and Manfred Trenz as artist, the Amiga graphic conversions were done by Lothar I think, see below)

However I screwed up someplace else. There were magazines excited about the game as at that time you did pre-advertising for titles months ahead of launch as otherwise you could not sell into retail or get customers into the shop. Based on those ads we got requests for interviews, previews etc, which basically means the writers visited our studio and did their thing. Remember, no internet, no Skype, no mobile phones, only landlines and travel manually to get screenshots (no digital ones at that time either, they made photos of the monitors).

So ASM, a popular German games magazine but a little on the "yellow press side" interviewed me, which went well. Off the record we spoke a bit about the project and I told them how big of a fan Manfred and Thomas are of Mario Brothers on Nintendo NES. The writer asked "So basically Giana Sisters is a clone of Mario then". "Yeah" I said, "but. ..." it was too late, the writer had his tag line without telling me.

The Issue went into print with a cover of Giana Sisters and their line "Teut Weidemann: Giana Sisters is a clone of Mario!".

Great. I learned for a lifetime not to trust ANY writer in the gaming industry. So we put legal in charge and forced the magazine to stop the printing presses, destroy the issue and reprint. Yes we did that.

It was the first issue of ASM not appearing on time.

Giana Sisters was released on C64, C128, Amstrad, Spectrum, Amiga and Atari ST and was a smashing hit, the fastest selling game Rainbow Arts ever saw. The British distributor (a British company called US Gold) booked ads with a huge screenshot and the tagline "Giana Sisters - moving over Brothers". It created a huge hype and .... caught the attention from Nintendo. Until then they ignored that little game on the little home computer because it didn't harm them, but now the ads attacked their holy grail: the Mario IP.

It took just a few days until an armada (really, like 6 or 7) of lawyers in black suits, suitcases and tie went into our offices and shut the sales down, permanently, worldwide. We never had a chance. Nintendo hired like the best of the best.

Yes we sold games on tapes! Now a rarity.

It had long term consequences as well which we didn't anticipated: Nintendo, being a Japanese company, has a brain of an elephant. They never forget. So when the console market exploded and riches were found on the SNES market Rainbow Arts always was denied to publish games on Nintendo platforms. Only years later they could do this. Once a thief, always a thief.

Giana Sisters was re-released on iOS and Steam just recently and a new version was done by Spellbound, the company of the deceased Armin Gessert, the guy who did the spiritual successor of Giana Sisters "Hard'n Heavy" later on. Please note that the company Reline on the cover an dcredits was owned by Rainbow Arts and they used the label in fear Nintendo would notice. For the same reason Armin never wanted to be in the credits of the game :(

Thomas Hertzler left Rainbow Arts after Giana Sisters and founded blue Byte, the company behind The Settlers, Battle Isle and more. The company was then bought by Ubisoft in 2001 which has released Settlers Online in 2010, the game I have been working on.

That's how small the world still is in the gaming industry.