sorentm

[sorentm]

25 years of Zero-G.

I am sitting in front of my browser staring at a big green button that says: “Release App”. If I press it, I will release my very own game, Zero-G, to Steam. It will go out there, people will probably play it, and some might have fun doing it. My game. I did it. I really did it.

The thing is… I am scared. Not that people will hate it. Well yes, that scares me too, but the thing that scares me most is… How will this affect me? I have lived with this game for almost 25 years, and now I am supposed to cut it loose?

25 years is a long time to develop one game. I mean, Duke Nukem Forever only took 15 and more than 25 versions of FIFA are available now, though none of them existed when I started.

Actually a lot of cool stuff did not exist when I started:

Playstation and Nintendo 64

DOOM (not even Wolfenstein 3D)

Web browsers (at least not publicly available).

C# and Java

DVD’s

SMS’s

mp3’s

GPS

...and some of my current colleagues.

So, what happened? Well, it’s a long story…

The Amiga Prototype.

So, you’ve probably figured that I am old. I am old enough to be one of the first kids to grow up with computer games. I got the Donkey Kong Game and Watch when I was 12 and the Commodore 64 the year after. And they completely blew my mind. Unfortunately, since I was both a lazy and pragmatic kid, I figured that it was about as realistic for me to make a living off computer games, as it would be to become an astronaut (my second choice). In the end I did not bother to really learn how to program.

But that all changed in 1990 with AMOS BASIC for the Amiga. AMOS was pretty much what you would call a game engine today like Unity or Unreal. All of a sudden, the stuff that would have taken months of hard work and dedication could be had with few lines of code.

Load IFF “BackgroundScreen.iff” Load "MyMusic.Abk" : Music 1 Double Buffer

BAM! A double buffered screen with a background image, and music playing! I started making games. All kinds of games. I would often give myself challenges like creating an entire 10 level platform game with all music and graphics in 24 hours, or a racing game in an afternoon.

And then I thought: Why not make “Ender’s Game - The Game”?

Ender’s Game has been my favorite book since it came out, and I thought the Zero Gravity shooting gameplay would probably be awesome. I planned to make it like all the other sports games with a character you controlled, and the rest of the team being controlled by the computer, but to test it out I initially mapped all characters to the same joystick, and was surprised to find that it actually made controlling the team both really fun and interesting. Unfortunately it also made shooting feel stupid since everybody shot at the same time in the same direction, so I replaced the guns with a ball, and thus, by accident, the game had designed itself.

To get some graphics I got hold of my good friend Søren Lundgaard, and after a long night of matches so intense that I ended up breaking a joystick in half, he was in - provided he was allowed to assist with the coding and design. By 1993 we’d gotten a pretty polished prototype up and running, and things were great!

PC versions, anyone?

But then again - not really great. We had taken AMOS as far as we could. Even with a new AMOS compiler the framerate simply could not reach acceptable levels, which made the gameplay feel sluggish. So we decided that we’d had our fun and put the game to rest.

I kept thinking about it though, and I would often showcase it to people and try to convince them to remake it on the PC. Since there were no easy-to-use game engines available I was obviously too lazy to do it myself.

I talked to this guy while we were at board-diving practice (Yes, that’s something I did). He was all in, and I promised to give him all the assets, so he could have a go at it. Then he jumped from the diving board and immediately dislocated his shoulder badly and never returned.

I then talked to this other guy I met at Computer Science. He was brilliant, very energetic, wanted very much to make a PC version, and he actually did get the assets. But then he disappeared for a few months. The next time I saw him he looked really bad-ass. He had lost some weight, and had shaved his head. I said to him: “Hey Peter! you are bald! You look AWESOME!”. He gave me this really weird look, had a long pause and then just said. “Yes”.

He then turned and walked away, and… well, you have guessed it. He died a few weeks later.

Needless to say that completely killed my enthusiasm for Zero-G and for the next 10 years I left it alone.

The Deadline Games version.

Jump cut to 2004. Somehow my good old pal Søren Lundgaard had managed to get me hired at Deadline Games, even though I had tried to sabotage it as much as I could, by mentioning the fact that I find most games boring at the job interviews. Each of the 4 times I applied. But hey, in the end I became a game programmer, and did not need to be an astronaut, which would have been a disaster anyways since I get dizzy from just about anything that moves.

I had been on the team that did Total Overdose, and while I did the PSP-remake Chili con Carnage we got a huge contract for Total Overdose 2, so we had moved into a big office-building and staffed up. Then all of a sudden the contract was cancelled. It later turned out, that our publisher, Eidos, was at the same time in contact with this other team that was brewing on a game called Just Cause - a game that in feature set turned out absurdly similar to the Total Overdose 2 game design! But they had fully functioning world-streaming tech already, so we got the axe.

That was disastrous.

We managed to stay afloat for quite some time by doing the two Watchmen games that were objectively rushed pieces of dung, but subjectively (when I think about how little time we actually had) are still games that I am personally really proud of. But none of our pitches sold, and money was gushing out. By January 2009 we were on the brink of going broke.

I told the producer about Zero-G and my extremely interesting story of that time when I broke a joystick in half, and I was given 3 weeks to do a prototype. After those 3 weeks everybody available jumped in and we had a manic development sprint for 3 months. The goal was to just get something, anything playable really, on Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network. These online stores  were booming at that time but were not flooded with games yet, so new releases still had a good shot at getting noticed. It might have made a difference…

… but we weren’t fast enough. In May 2009 Deadline Games went bankrupt.

     The Deadline Games version of Zero-G.

Rising from the ashes?

After the bankruptcy a group of us tried to buy the assets for Zero-G and our custom engine from the estate so we could form a miniature company and release it. Unfortunately someone else put more money on the table and bought everything in one go. We managed to buy the actual Zero-G assets from them, but they would not let us buy the engine. And in the end they would not even commit to supporting the engine if we licensed it, so the project was soon doomed.

Buying those assets seemed like an expensive life lesson, but at least it gave me a build of the game I could use to dazzle the guys at Playdead into hiring me for the LIMBO production.

The Unity Version.

And that would probably have been it, if it hadn’t been for a particularly nasty attack of midlife crisis that came for me around 2013. Usually, what you do about those is to buy a pinball machine, take up speed rollerskating or grow a weird beard, but in this case the normal cures did not work. So one lonely night when I was feeling particularly worthless I decided to make Zero-G one more time - just to show myself and the world that I could! Nothing is so bad, that it isn’t good for something, right?

At that time I had been working professionally on the game INSIDE for a few years, so I had gotten pretty confident with the Unity engine, and since I had all the assets already, all I had to do was to reimplement the entire game code - again. So I did, and it was more fun than ever. I could rant on about all the weird things I have had to do or learn because I had decided to rely on nobody else - as the time when I had to hand-build an animation in notepad, since I only had animation data in Deadlines own exported format, and one of them was so weird I could not reverse engineer it. Oh, good times. But I will tell you later. None of the stories are as interesting as the one with the broken joystick anyways.

And that brings me back to the big green button on my screen. Release App. What will likely happen is that my little anachronistic game will drown in the raging tsunami of indie games washing over Steam these days. And my life project will leave no more of a lasting impression than a wet footprint on a beach.

On the other hand, then I am free to do something else.

I’m gonna push the mother out of that button!