After Jeff Minter recently confirmed at Manchester’s PLAY expo that AMC’89 was long lost from his source disks, it seemed that all was lost.
I had even mentioned the conversation to Mark Cambell (web admin for the brilliant Konix archive), and we said that we may have to rely on a complete fluke of it turning up. And a fluke just a few weeks later was what happened!
Well, just after our conversation – Version 0.4 of the game’s source (an early build with just the Egyptian graphics) was found within a batch of test disks that had been passed on. The news directly from the Konix site can be found here. It is an amazing finding, and what is even more amazing is the fact that it has been got running within the Konix emulator already – which has only recently just been coded up. Check out the YouTube video below.
It is brilliant news that something of the game has been found, and even more chuffed with the finding is Jeff himself – who had thought the game was lost forever. The old video clips that were recovered from VHS clips were once taunting images of a game that we were desperate to play and hear those fractal generated sounds properly for the first time. Now we are able to – and it is thanks of course to the fantastic work of Mark Campbell!
We’re not sure what the next steps are – but Jeff has given permission for the game to be released – maybe he might even finish it in some shape or form! Once things are tidied up, the plan will be to release it with the emulator.
Although there is little to actually play – because the source has been found, levels could be build for it. Possibly the missing bits re-implemented from the old videos as source. Many possibilities, we’ll see how it all pans out.
