Mad Men Software were set to release the fully completed game Messiah 3.
This game was a RPG covering six disk sides and was to have a large manual due to the size of the game.
Gene Barker programmed the game and the game was confirmed as finished.
The game was mentioned in various magazines such as Commodore World Issue #3 (Page 8) and RUN Magazine Sep/Oct 1992 (Page 13). The articles can be found above in the articles link.
Apparently the game was not sold because of the game manual and problems with reproduction of it. A little bit of sad tale for such a massive game.
Jazzcat got hold of Gene Barker with the conversation going as follows:
GTW: I remember years ago when Mad Men Software released the compression kit, which was a dev tool for Messiah 3 and I also remember it being intended as a 5 part series. From memory the production stopped even though the game was completed because of the reproduction costs of the accompanying manual. Does that sound right?
Gene Barker: That was part of it, the bottom line was that the 64 market dropped out from underneath us before we completed the project. The industry transitioned to console development and back then, only big shops could afford the development kits, leaving us out-of-luck. In recent years, we have danced-around the idea of adapting M3 to a mobile platform.
For fun, I’ll see if we can send a few screenshots your way to spice-up your page. Plus send you a list of people involved – I was only one part of a dedicated development team. This will take a little homework on my part.
‘Am impressed with the care you take in your research. ‘Have fun,
Gene.
PS: Regarding the manual – That was our write-protection. All the game’s text / interaction with NPC’s was contained in this manual. We liked this, because it gave us the freedom to write a rich story, was far easier on your eyes, and didn’t burden you with disk / hardware based write-protection.”
Work is underway to try and get remains of the game. We need to try and preserve such a complete title, so the search begins!…
Can you help?
Contributions: Jazzcat, Shane Fell, Gene Barker
Also, posted the game loading to its title screen and credits here: https://twitter.com/arctips/status/1678860290128240641?s=20
Thanks for sharing Gene (i’ll add the scan to the entry), and great to hear that you’re developing a new version of the game.
Is there any possibility of the C64 original being made available some day as well or any plans for something like that?
Found and posted the first press we got for Messiah III (M3) on page 97 in Jul 92 issue of Compute: https://archive.org/details/1992-07-compute-magazine/page/n97