Yet another game from the creators of Lemmings on the C64, Alter Developments, and this time a title which was to be their icing on the cake. A mixture of all the best elements of all the best C64 games out there.
A little big a statement you say, but this is what Alter Developments wanted to create. A mixture of Smash TV, Rubicon, Turrican, Myth and many others to create a game unlike any other.
The dreams were all well and good, and Zeppelin showed interest (but only would fully when Alter had fully converted the failed Championship Run conversion)… but sadly as with many a GTW… this one was never meant to be.
Once things hadn’t worked out with Championship Run, work came back to History Of The World, and it was decided that the C64 was a dying platform… so efforts were concentrated on the Amiga instead…. and so the game was shelved.
Niels Brouwers, the coder of the game, has kindly provided us with an exclusive set of previews of the game. These have never been seen before until now, and nothing was ever really mentioned about the game until Niels suddenly dug it out for GTW.
At the moment the remains show 4 crucial elements which make up some very bare bones for the game. The first most complete part is a sideways scrolling test demo with the main character fighting against very little… with some really nice backgrounds.
The second part features a full colour bitmap scroller which would have no doubt been used within the playable side on preview seen previous.
Following this is a overhead Alien Breed style character which you can control and shoot bullets around on a black screen. A character test demo is exactly what this is.
Finally there is a test rotation routine for a large sacre coeur, which was to rotate around the main player as an end of level enemy. You have to move it yourself, but it gives an indication of the style of enemies which were planned for this game.
That is it for the time being. Overall, it is a promising looking preview which although isn’t really playable… it looks exciting and it makes you wonder what might have been had some of the other elements been finished more. If Zeppelin released this, they may have had one of their biggest titles in their history… but sadly they didn’t, and so this now resides in the GTW archives.
We may see more soon, who knows… but read what Niels has to say about his game in Creator Speaks….
Case almost closed on this one…
Contributions: Jon Wells
Supporting content
Available downloads
- preview_hotw.zip (zip)
Gallery
Creator speaks
Niels Brouwers about work on History Of The World...
"This is the 'magnus opus' from the minds of Marc Hermans and myself (aka Alter Development). Our goal here was to make the 'game of games', combining all the cool games that we knew of (turrican, rubicon, smash TV, myth, etc.) into the one and only 'ueber-game'. We did several previews / proof of concepts and that is what is on this disk. We never got to finish the game. Zeppeling Games were kind of interested in such a game, but they wanted us to do a port of ChampionShip Run from the Amiga to C64 first. After that other things came by and before we knew it the C64 era was over and moved to Amiga.
The files on the disk:
Beachy.joy#2-fir
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This was a scroller using the full available palet of colors for the C64, not just a simple character based scroller but one based on bitmap scrolling. Very cool graphics in there as well. The idea was good! Press fire to scroll the image.
History joy#2/AD
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This was our text based scroller, with colors per character and a faster scrolling bottom as well. Use joystick port two to push down first (so the guy hits the ground) and then right to start walking. The skull was just there to show off some baddy, we were quite into skulls as baddies back then :-)
Fromabove joy#2/AD
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In another secion, we would our hero-guy seen from the top running around like in the Smash TV action inferno. You can control this guy with the joy in port 2 and do press fire!!! He had lots of bullets and these weren't sprites so there were bound to be much more when we would have put in the enemies.
sacre coeur 1/2
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Since the game was called History Of The World we thought it would be cool to include a BIG sacre coeur (for enemies then) that would rotate around the hero and attack him from all sides. Marc drew up a rotating sacre coeur and this is the result. Start up and use joystick port:up to rotate the sacre coeur!"
Niels Brouwers.
