Genesis

For a little while now I've been thinking about the good old days when I was a young man; and when making games used to be a very exciting and creative experience. Lately however, making games, or at least anything except mobile and handheld games, has become very cumbersome and everything seems to take forever to get right - quite different from how it all started. The spirit of the bedroom coder seems to have been completely lost in recent years, and much of the creative drive that we used to share along with it. So I set to thinking about a home-brew project to try and rekindle those halcyon days when men were men, women were women, and Duran Duran enjoyed the number 1 spot.

With a project of my own, I could produce a game relatively quickly, create all of the game's assets and retrieve that sense of fulfilment from making a game for myself in much less time than I'm used to in my professional day-job. I remember the days when it took just three months to write such a game - a far cry from today. Nowadays, it takes two or three weeks just to get a shadowing algorithm working correctly. The things you could do in two or three weeks on an old-school game!

The problem though, what game could I produce that is still of interest and desirable in today's high-manpower, high-production-value gaming marketplace? In today's world where it takes 30 people and 2 years to make a game, how can one man produce a game that gamers would genuinely enjoy and would be of value to them?

There are a number things in life that I hold dear to my heart, and the classic Atari game Tempest front and centre amongst them. Tempest was a truly brilliant game in its day and definitely one of my personal favourites. In point of fact, I think so highly of the game, that I actually have a genuine Tempest arcade cabinet here at home and is one of the coolest things that I have ever bought.

The game itself has a certain dream-like quality to it, and indeed, the idea for the basic concept came to the original programmer in a dream. Fittingly, considering its inception, it carries some mystique even now. Tempest, is a gamer's game, a game to master only for the hardcore elite.

So here is my answer, to the question of which type of game I should produce. Tempest has fantastic gameplay, and abstract visuals, both of which I could easily reproduce given my love for genuine old-school arcade games and my now long experience in the games industry. It seems like a perfect fit.

Well, those thoughts of gaming genesis whirled within my mind around the middle of 2005, which of course is some time ago. The game has now been written and it's here for you to play. Of course, I couldn't call it Tempest, and I couldn't have made a straight simulation of Tempest - Atari would thank me by raping my bank account for sure. So I've called it Ultra, and it's a modern homage to Tempest, not a copy. Play on.