My week in game dev #25

Revolution and the Raj

A couple of years back I wrote in my book about the genesis of Revolution Software and a little part of that story involved Charles and I visiting a games show in London and seeing a game called Champion of the Raj, by Level 9. Up until that point, Level 9 had written and published a long series of extremely good adventure games. They were what we called at that time graphic-adventures in that they were parser based text-adventures but a few locations would display a simple line based drawing that depicted the scene. In many ways, these games were far richer than the point and click games that followed, but times were changing and at this point we already had the basic idea for Virtual Theatre.

Anyway, at the show we saw Champion of the Raj and Level 9 appeared to be thinking the same as us because their game clearly depicted animated characters walking on, off, and around the screen (using a new engine, which they called HUGE). A living world, in other words. Their idea, we assumed, was the same as ours - to leap-frog the simple location based PnC games that companies such as Sierra were producing. We were impressed with what we saw, and inspired by it. If Level 9 were thinking the same as us, then we were probably right. It gave us confidence in our plan to proceed and write the game that would become Lure of the Temptress.

Oddly, though, the Raj game, when it was finally released, was not the adventure game that Charles and I saw, it was a strategy game which didn’t do particularly well. Not long after, Level 9 were no more, which was a very sad thing to happen.

Charles and I were pretty confident that our memory of 35 years back was correct. We know what we saw! But we had no way to prove it.

Recently I did an interview with Lewis Packwood (next issue of Retro Gamer mag I believe!) and the Raj issue came up. Lewis asked if this - Champion of the Raj - was the game I referred to and yes, it was, but in name only. What had happened to it?

Lewis took up the mystery and contacted Frank Gasking (from The Games that Weren’t) and he suggested talking to Richard Hewison, who had previously interviewed Mike Austin of Level 9 (and was at Mirrorsoft in the 90’s and therefore had had contact with Level 9 back in the day - and had also worked on the first three Revolution games).

Richard then talked directly to Mike Austin and asked about the Raj project. It turns out that what we saw was just a rough demo, and actually no real engine was behind it all. After it was signed to Mirrorsoft the game was changed into the strategy game that we now see. So, Charles and I hadn’t imagined it after all. But that rough demo had nonetheless cemented our plans for Virtual Theatre and we carried it forward, to some success, and with, bizarrely, the same publisher that had presumably had a hand in changing Level 9’s plans.

It’s a funny old world :)

Anyway, mid campaign now with the UrbX Kickstarter. I think it’s going pretty well. Check it out - the big-box will be a valuable collector’s item before you know it :)

The whole thing is a total time sink, but I’ve also been working hard to fix a whole series of crash bugs hidden deep within the Z80 version of the engine. The defects were always there. How did it ever work? The players of the demo have been doing a great job of bug testing it for me!

Finally, here’s the Brazen/Fusion team at RetCon. Good event. We’ll go next year, too.