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…