Ooze was a horror based text adventure game which was released on the Amiga, PC and ST by German software house Dragonware back in 1989.
It was also advertised for the C64 and was previewed in a German magazine called “Compute Mit” by Martina Strack of later ASM fame.
Unfortunately no screenshots were shown and nothing of the actual game ever surfaced apart from on the 16-bits, and it seems the preview although talking about the C64 version was actually referring mostly to the Amiga version due to talk about resizing the graphical area.
So what happened?…. How far did it get?…. Did it even get started?
Thanks to some amazing research by Anonymous contributor (apologies for the long delay!), it seems that the answer to there being a game is Yes and No. The details and text that follows is direct from our contributor in his own words:
In an interview in PC Games issue 11 1998, page 197, German programmer Guido Henkel mentions that he started his own label named Dragonware in the 80s, and one of the games he created was “Adventure Ooze”.
After speaking about his first C64 game, Hellowoon, which he claims to also have converted to the Amiga and Atari ST, he goes on to mention Ooze:
“After that, Guido immediately pounced on his next product, the Adventure Ooze, which he rewrote for the PC in addition to the C64, Atari ST and Amiga.”
So, directly from the programmer’s mouth, here’s a possible confirmation that the C64 version existed. So where did it go?
Further on in the article, Henkel mentions that Swiss publisher Linel bought the game, but things did not work out:
“We signed a contract for the whole of Europe, but the result was quite pathetic. All that came out was an English version of Ooze.”
This implies that there were several versions of the game, and this could prove vital in learning where the C64 version went.
A clue is given by this old homepage (Lysator is a well-known computer enthusiast association at a major Swedish university and tends to be reliable). It mentions two different versions of Ooze, one German and one English: https://www.lysator.liu.se/
According to the page, there was originally a C64 German version of Ooze. But it never got converted into English. And, according to the PC Games interview above, since Linel only released the English version, the German version must have got stuck somewhere and never made it out, for any platform. And that would mean the end of the C64 version.
But it was presumably there – in German form only. On the page, Guido is also quoted as saying that he no longer owns the rights to his own games anymore, but there is no date for that quote.
So is there anything left of the C64 edition? Hard to say. On his homepage, Guido Henkel speaks at length about the Atari ST version of Ooze, but never mentions the C64:
https://guidohenkel.com/2018/
Nevertheless, an intro screen was released in 1989 by Bizzmo: https://csdb.dk/release/?id=
It is unknown whether this is the official screen, or just inspired by, having seen the Amiga game or so. But the year does match very well (if let’s say that the C64 game was intended for an English conversion).
Bizzmo is named Doug Roberts and is British. Henkel did seem to have some type of connection to the early demo scene (if the PC Games article above is correctly interpreted), so who knows, maybe they knew each other. https://csdb.dk/search/?
Cowriter Hans-Jürgen Brändle sadly passed away in 2005, according to Henkel in this interview:
https://www.atarilegend.com/
Could something of the game be saved? It could be tricky, but who knows what might be around the corner.
Contributions: Bugjam, Anonymous Contributor
