1994 GKS Design
Platforms: Commodore Amiga and PC
Dark Mission was to be the first offering from GKS Design, a new group dedicated to Amiga gaming and created back in 1994 by students Stephen Haunts and Chris Rundell. They were based within Milton Keynes and also had someone called Kevin Kennard involved, helping with sales and information.
The game itself was an Aliens-style isometric adventure where you explore a hostile space-station, killing aliens and completing four missions in total. It seems you would move your character around the screen using a mouse, and be able to click and interact with different items within each room (similar to the SCUMM engine games).
In the game, you only control one person, and you have to solve a series of problems whilst avoiding/killing aliens along the way. Interestingly, your use of gun fire can destroy surrounding items and objects, so you’d need to be careful about destroying objects that would be usable to complete a puzzle.
One of the first jobs in the game would be to stop four damaged reactors from exploding. As they are all malfunctioning in different ways, each one would require a different approach to try and fix. After that, you would go on to try and rescue captured colonists and destroying pockets of aliens.
This wasn’t a game that you would be able to get in shops, but would be all mail-order based with “minimum packaging and maximum value-for-money” at the cost of £17.99. So, no box – just a disk and some instructions.
Although looking very promising in the Amiga Power preview, GKS Design unfortunately didn’t get any games out the door and were not credited it seems on any other Amiga titles. We don’t know at this stage how far the game had got (no review happened it seems), but interestingly the Amiga Power article on the game reveals that a PC version was complete – though this seems to be missing too. If anyone locates a copy of the PC version, please let us know!
Chris Rundell is still working within the games industry today, so its hoped that we can get hold of Chris to find out more about this title and even see it saved. If you know anything more about the game, please let us know.
With thanks to Karl Kuras for flagging up and archive.org for the scans.
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