RetroGaming

Interview with wargame publisher Iain McNeil about the business of publishing wargames.

Iain McNeil is development director of Slitherine, Matrix Games, Ageod and Shenandoah Studios. Back in 2014 I wrote a story about wargames, and he kindly answered several questions for me. I’ve published them here. Be aware that my questions were tailored to fit the article I was writing, and are mostly about the wargame market and the challenges of being a wargame publisher.

An English-language interview with wargame developer Tomislav Uzelac.

Back in 2014, I wrote a story about wargames, and reached out to Tomislav Uzelac from 2×2 Games for input. In 2011 they had released their debut game Unity of Command. Here are my questions and his answers:

We’ve spoken with Mikito Ichikawa, Junko Ozawa and Sensu about the sequel to Space Mouse from 1981.

In 2016 I was lucky enough to get to interview Mikito Ichikawa, a Japanese game developer who’s been making games since the eighties. He’s worked with some of the country’s most famous developers and been involved in the making of classics such as Streets of Rage 2 and Slap Fight MD.

Junko Ozawa created the music and sound effects for many classic arcade and console games.

If you grew up in the eighties or early nineties, you’ve probably got fond memories from playing games on arcade machines. After feeding the machines some coins, you got to enjoy some of the biggest classics of the era, for as long as your lives – and coins – lasted. Arcade games were usually far more technically advanced than their counterparts for consoles and home computers, thanks to expensive and specialized hardware we could only dream of at home, and playing these games were often a bit like peeking into the future of gaming.

Before there was Grand Theft Auto, there was a game called “Crime Fighter” where you had to earn money before the time ran out. You spent your turn (day) setting up ways to make money, which could include robbing a place, kidnapping a kid for ransom, stealing a car, gambling, etc. You could also help get better chances by doing certain things like working out or hiring gang members.

It’s been awhile since I’ve played it, but iirc you have something like 30 days (30 turns) to come up with a certain amount of cash. Once you beat the game, it basically becomes a game of who can hit top score with the most money in 30 days.

It’s surprisingly fun and complex for an MS DOS game. Would definitely recommend to anyone who likes retro games and a turn based grand theft auto type of game. It’s nice because it’s not complete turn based, but you have so many actions you can do in a day.

Let’s not beat around the bush: Will Rock is basically Serious Sam.

That’s the first comparison anyone makes. And they’re not wrong. It plays almost exactly like Croteam’s arena shooter—fast, chaotic, and ridiculous. But calling it a copy misses something important. Because Will Rock isn’t just a clone. It’s a four-month miracle, a budget game from a brand-new studio, and a strange, beautiful mess stuffed with quirks that make it unforgettable. That is, if you were lucky enough to stumble into it.

Saber Interactive was brand new in 2003. Will Rock was their very first game. They built it in just over four months. Four months to create an entire FPS from scratch on a brand-new engine. An engine that didn’t even have a name yet—it would later become Saber3D. At the time, Will Rock was basically a tech demo wearing an Ancient Greece skin.

The game came out in June 2003 under Ubisoft. But the marketing wasn’t exactly explosive. The most famous thing about it wasn’t a trailer. It was the soundtrack. Specifically: Twisted Sister’s “I Wanna Rock.” It’s definitely in the trailer. It’s apparently in the main menu. YouTube uploads show it.

And yet… after replaying the game, I never heard it once. That’s not a song you just miss. So maybe it’s a ghost track. Maybe it’s a Mandela Effect. Either way, it’s the most famous song that may or may not actually be in the game.

Distribution was weird, too. Ubisoft sold it in stores. But it also came bundled with Gigabyte PC-CDROM drives. A lot of players didn’t buy it—they just found it on their new hardware. That’s how many people first played Will Rock: by accident. Which might explain why it feels like a half-remembered fever dream now.

The story is early-2000s action nonsense. Willford Rockwell, archaeologist, gets possessed by Prometheus. Prometheus gives him powers. He goes to war with Zeus to save his girlfriend. That’s it. But the Greek mythology setting works. Where Serious Sam had Egypt and aliens, Will Rock has Minotaurs, Harpies, Centaurs, Cyclops, skeleton warriors, and massive Atlas statues that rip themselves free from pedestals and come for you.

And this is where the boom begins.

Minotaurs don’t just die—they split into more Minotaurs when you kill them. Atlas statues don’t just stand there—they crash forward like a granite linebacker. Harpies dive-bomb screaming. Rat-bombs explode. Enemies accidentally damage each other in the chaos. The screen becomes a mess of smoke, blood, and flying marble.

The weapons make it louder. You’ve got the standard pistol, shotgun, machine gun, and minigun. But then it gets weird. The shotgun looks like a lever-action rifle and uses rifle ammo. The Medusa Gun turns enemies to stone so you can smash them into gravel. The Acid Gun inflates enemies until they burst with a wet rubber squeal. The Atomic Gun fires a miniature nuke. And the shovel—the humble melee weapon—is absurdly effective, especially against archers. Every weapon feels tuned for chaos.

Then there are the Titan powers. You collect gold to buy them at altars. Immortality makes sense. Titan Damage makes sense. Titan Motion? It slows down time—and slows you down too. It’s basically useless. A broken power-up in a game already running at maximum speed. But that’s Will Rock. Half the fun is in its glorious mistakes.

The level design swings wildly. Sometimes you’re in wide-open killboxes built for maximum slaughter. Sometimes you’re in cramped switch-hunts that feel like filler. You’ll bounce on trampolines, fire yourself from catapults, sneak through a Trojan horse, pull endless levers. Sometimes it’s fun. Sometimes it’s busywork. But it’s never quiet.

Reviews at the time were mixed. Metacritic score: 63. GameSpot called it a “mindless knockoff.” IGN called it “hard.” Other critics called it too easy because enemies dropped in three hits and health pickups were everywhere. Even the difficulty became a quirk—easy for some, brutal for others.

For most players, Will Rock disappeared quickly. It was overshadowed by Serious Sam and never got a sequel. But for the people who remember it? It’s the quirks that stand out. The regenerating Minotaurs. The statues that wake up. The useless Titan Motion. The shotgun that’s somehow a rifle. The shovel that’s better than half the guns. The ghost of Twisted Sister haunting the main menu.

For everyone else, Will Rock is just another budget shooter from 2003. But for those who stumbled into it—maybe from a Gigabyte CD-ROM—it’s something stranger. A flawed, loud, chaotic snapshot of early-2000s FPS excess. A game that didn’t just copy Serious Sam. It kept the boom going.

Numbertron is a single- or multiplayer puzzle game for the Sharp MZ-80A and Sharp MZ-700.

Numbertron is a pretty simple game, but you need to consider your moves carefully if you want to set high scores. The game is also surprisingly fun in multiplayer!

Turns out Tetris Elements is my favourite Tetris.

And I’ve played a lot of Tetris. Atari Tetris, Nintendo Tetris, SEGA Tetris, Capcom Tetris, EA Tetris… I’ve even played multiple board game versions—and yes, there are more than you’d think.

But nothing fills me with joy like Tetris Elements, the 2004 THQ release that stayed stuck on Windows and Mac. Never consoles. Never handhelds. Just a weird budget disc for early-2000s computers.

It was meant to follow Tetris Worlds. ImaginEngine built it under THQ’s ValuSoft label. Mostly an educational-games studio, with a little help from a programming shop in India. Small budget, short schedule. The kind of game you’d expect to look rushed.

And it does. But it also tries things other official Tetris games never touched again.

On the surface, it’s simple: Classic mode plus five elemental modes. Earthquake, Fire, Ice, Stratosphere, Tempest. But these aren’t harmless gimmicks. They mess with the core game. Earthquake shakes the board and warps your stack. Tempest forces you to manage two rotating wells. Stratosphere drops meteors that can open perfect holes—or land garbage in the exact spot you needed clear.

Even the safe-looking modes have teeth. Ice will slam a piece straight to the bottom if an icicle hits it. Fire can chain explosions if you heat-drop pieces in sequence. These weren’t casual distractions. They were strange, playable twists on Tetris that you couldn’t get anywhere else.

And then there are the quirks.

The game says it uses the modern SRS rotation system. But pieces spawn in odd orientations, like the letters they’re named after. Wall kicks are inconsistent. The configuration files literally include a “–99, –99” coordinate—developer shorthand for “don’t use this”—as an actual kick entry. It shipped like that.

Hard drops don’t even behave consistently. Sometimes the next piece spawns instantly. Sometimes there’s a pause just long enough to throw off your rhythm. It feels half-finished.

Look in the game’s files and it gets stranger. All the rotation data, piece definitions, and rules are in plain-text .INI files. No encryption, no compression. It’s like the studio assumed no one would bother to check. That’s how players found five unused pieces just sitting there. Pentominoes, oversized blocks, even odd trimino shapes. All fully defined. None ever used.

The audio hides unused tracks too. Better quality than what shipped. There are unused menu graphics, leftover text strings. “Name Exists” sits quietly in the files. There’s even an unused “You Lose” screen. It’s a Tetris game with the workshop still attached.

Even the presentation feels slightly off. Clearing a Tetris flashes the screen white, like the game’s trying to burn your retinas as a reward. The music is fine—light techno, some nods to the classics—but the big feature was loading your own MP3s. And then the game speeds them up in pitch as your stack rises. A nice idea if you like drum ’n’ bass. Less nice if you don’t want your playlist chipmunked mid-match.

Reception at the time was muted. Two critics reviewed it. Scored in the 70s. People moved on. Hardcore players dismissed it. Casual players bought it in a bargain bin, played Fire mode once, and forgot it.

But the quirks gave it a second life.

The .INI structure made it one of the easiest official Tetris games to modify. Fans enabled the unused pieces. They rewrote gravity. They fixed rotation bugs themselves. It became a little laboratory for people who liked taking Tetris apart.

On Mac, it stuck around longer than expected. The disc ran on both OS 9 and OS X. PowerPC Macs could run it cleanly. Classic mode on OS X 10.4 ran even better. Intel Macs killed it, but by then it was already out of print.

On PC, it lived as long as people kept CD drives. No keys, just disc-based protection. When drives vanished, so did the game—until no-CD patches and Archive.org brought it back. Today it runs on Windows 10 with glitches. Windows 11 is hit or miss.

Its reputation now? Not a classic. Not even a cult favourite. Just an oddball entry people dig up because it’s strange, moddable, and unlike anything else in the series.

It’s not polished. It’s not balanced. But it’s an official Tetris that doesn’t fit neatly anywhere in the series history. And somehow, that makes it fit perfectly.

Martin Alper co-founded the british games publisher Mastertronic in 1983. When Mastertronic was later purchased by Richard Branson, Alper became president of the new company. This is a transcript of an interview conducted by phone in 2013. The interview was conducted as research for an article on The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour, so the focus of the interview is on the story behind these games. Martin Alper sadly passed away in 2015.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/48724112

We had a chat with one of the original creators of Counter-Strike.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/48706271

Rogue is one of the most influential games of all time. Even if you haven’t played it, you’ve definitely played several games that have Rogue’s DNA in them. It became so popular when it was released for UNIX-based systems in 1980 that it created its own genre, which we still know as ‘roguelike games’. Even in the decades when these games were niche experiences, the genre was important. The action role-playing game Diablo built directly on the roguelike genre, which means that all the games that followed in Diablo’s footsteps also have their roots here.

American Jim Sachs is one of the true greats in the area of classic pixel art. He is particularly known for his work on the Amiga, where he was responsible for the graphics in one of the platform’s most important system sellers, Defender of the Crown, as well as Ports of Call, which was a favourite here in Norway. However, his career didn’t end there, and if you were impressed by virtual aquariums around the turn of the millennium, it was probably his fish you were looking at.

Bob Koon was part of the original Westwood team that created the groundbreaking real-time strategy game Dune II, which is considered the first «modern» game in the genre. His main task was converting the game to the Amiga.

To Whom It May Deeply Concern,

I write to you not with courtesy, nor diplomacy, but with a blazing fire of indignation and righteous fury over the suffocating, authoritarian, and frankly disgusting actions of your organization. Collective Shout - an entity that masquerades as a moral guardian - has become nothing short of a censorship machine, functioning under a warped, puritanical crusade to erase anything that doesn't fit your rigid and Cherry-picked version of "appropriate" content. Your behavior is not that of a benevolent protector of society, but that of an ideological inquisition seeking to annihilate freedom of expression wherever it dares to show a shred of originality, edge, or nuance.

Let me be unequivocal - your group has no moral high ground. You do not represent "all women." You do not speak for society. And you most certainly do not speak for the millions of us who value artistic liberty, diverse storytelling, and the personal responsibility to choose what media we consume. You are not a grassroots watchdog. You are a self-appointed, unelected censorship lobby, whose behavior reeks of the same Orwellian overreach one might expect from repressive regimes.

Let’s get right to it. Your efforts to pressure Valve (Steam) and indie platforms like Itch.io into delisting and banning games - particularly ones that explore adult themes, anime-styled art, edgy humor, sexuality, or uncomfortable subject matter - are not only anti-consumer, but blatantly authoritarian. You paint all creators with the same broad brush, declaring their content harmful or exploitative, while ignoring context, nuance, genre, intent, and even satire.

Worse yet, you treat adults as if they are infants incapable of making their own decisions, demanding companies act as your moral police. You Cherry-pick games out of thousands, often misrepresenting them, weaponizing outrage, and demanding total erasure from the public sphere - not regulation, but outright obliteration.

This is not advocacy. This is ideological fascism dressed in progressive drag.

You’ve reduced a complex, multifaceted cultural medium like video games - a legitimate form of art - to a battlefield for your performative outrage and virtue signaling. Your idea of helping women or protecting children apparently includes silencing artists, crushing small developers, and bulldozing consumer agency into the dirt.

And don't even get me started on your hypocrisy. You rally against fictional content while staying suspiciously silent on real-world abuses that aren’t politically convenient or ideologically aligned. You have no issue rallying your digital pitchforks against harmless visual novels or fan-made indie games, but where is your energy when it comes to holding major corporations accountable for systemic exploitation in media, fashion, or advertising?

You see, your activism is selective, convenient, and ideologically filtered. You only care when it serves your brand. You don't protect people; you curate narratives. And you dare to insult the intelligence and autonomy of every free-thinking adult in the process.

I speak as a centrist, someone who believes in balance - in protecting the vulnerable without infantilizing society or handing over our civil liberties to mobs of moral puritans. I also speak from a mildly conservative perspective when I say: enough is enough.

You are not the solution. You are part of the problem.

You’re not just silencing perverse or extreme content (which already has laws and community moderation in place). You’re silencing weirdness, art, criticism, uncomfortable stories, and mature themes, and you're doing so under the false pretense that you are "protecting" people. The truth is, you don't trust people to think for themselves. And what’s worse - you don't want to.

And what do you think happens when organizations like yours suppress, stifle, and silence under the guise of righteousness? You drive people underground. You create resentment. You provoke backlash. You feed the very anti-feminist and anti-progressive sentiments you claim to oppose.

Congratulations. You’ve helped burn the bridge to discourse and torched it in self-congratulatory flames.

In the heart of justice and the restoration of creative freedom, I call upon your moronic organization - or any platforms you have influenced through coercion - to reverse and revoke every single action taken against affected games and developers. This includes but is not limited to: restoring delisted games, reinstating wrongfully banned creators, and issuing public apologies to the individuals and small studios you’ve dragged through the mud. The damage you've caused - reputational, financial, emotional - is not something that should be swept under the rug. You owe the global indie development community a reckoning. You must repair what you’ve broken, admit the overreach, and stand down from policing artistic expression that falls outside your moral doctrine. Otherwise, history will remember your group as a blight on creative culture - a bitter footnote in the timeline of digital censorship, authoritarian activism, and social overreach.

You are free to hold your values. But you are not free to enforce them on others under threats, manipulation, or corporate pressure. We didn’t elect you. We didn’t ask for your judgment. We don’t want your crusade.

Stop harassing game platforms.

Stop treating artists as criminals.

Stop silencing those who don't think like you.

And above all else, stop pretending you’re doing this for anyone’s benefit but your own self-righteous vanity.

Because if you continue on this course, rest assured - a cultural pushback will come. You are already being viewed by many not as protectors, but as moral tyrants. And history does not remember tyrants fondly.

You have every right to exist. But you do not have the right to dictate what the rest of us can see, play, create, or enjoy.

Stay out of our libraries. Stay out of our hard drives. And for the love of liberty, stay out of our lives.

Sincerely and unapologetically,

A Centrist Who's Had Enough

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/48536970

Fredrik Liljegren on the creation of Pinball Dreams