Year: 2006

In my boyhood I programmed a lot of applications and games, which I have never completed. After the “C64” I got a “Commodore 128DCR” and the some time later the matching monitor. At that time my best project was an own “Indiana Jones” adventure game for the “C64”. I was twelve years old and did not realized the legal issues using such a brand but this has not become a problem because I lost interest and never finished the game. With the help of magazines I was able to combine graphics and text mode but could not show sprites at the part of the screen, where the graphics were being displayed. In addition I was too young and unexperienced for such a large project.

At Christmas 1992 my parents bestowed me my third computer: It was a “Amstrad” PC with “Intel 80386SX“-CPU running at 20 MHz and equipped with 4 MB RAM and a 80 MB hard disc. The software contained “MS-DOS 5.0″ on three and “Microsoft Windows 3.1” on seven 3,5″-floppy-discs.
At the long vacation in 1993 I developed my first game, which I had finished and wanted to sell as shareware: “Antarctic City”. It was a hybrid of interpreted “QBasic” source code containing the game logic and “Turbo Pascal 5.5″-compiled executables to load bitmap files, which I had created in “Paintbrush for Windows“. Because my first contact with the Internet should not be until five years later I had no idea how to distribute it. I gave the shareware version to some class mates but never got a response. Probably I had thought not entrepreneurial enough at that age and so I focused my mind to next projects.
The following years I switched completely from “BASIC” to “Turbo Pascal”, from VGA to SVGA graphics, from PC speaker to “Sound Blaster“-compatible sound and started to work with ray tracing applications. So I was acquiring a lot of game development knowledge but did not finished a single product. That last until the year 2000…

Seventeen and a half years ago Germany was divided in two parts. West Germany had democracy and a social market economy. But I lived in East Germany, which was ruled by a kind of dictatorship (even though the official name was “German Democratic Republic“) with a centrally planned economy. The computer technology in our country was at least a decade out of date and a home computer cost triple the monthly income of one of my parents. So I had no chance to get my finger on one.

On my birthday in 1989 a Russian tele game had been given to me. A friend of my farther, who was working in the former Soviet Union, brought it along. The handheld was only able to let me play one game but at that time I was very happy. In the game you had to catch the rolling eggs from four sides. When a egg pitched onto the ground you lost a life. The game characters based on a famous Russian animation series called “Nu, pogodi!“, which was also known in East Germany. That was my first contact with electronic games.
In the November of the same year the “Berlin Wall” had fallen and the inner German border was opened. A half year later the GDR still was existing but a lot had already changed. Nonetheless I met the Hare and the Wolf again being on holiday. There was a arcade gaming machine called “Poly Play” with different games. The funniest of all was a “Pac-Man” clone starring the characters from “Nu, pogodi!”.

In the summer I was attending a computer club, where I got in contact with the “Robotron KC 87“. There I programmed my first game. You only had to hit a key on right time to shoot a rocket, which had to strike a car driving from the top to the bottom of the screen again and again.
With the “German Reunification” on October 3rd, 1990 my parants were able to bestow me my first own computer at the following Christmas: A “Commodore 64“. At that time I was eleven years old.