A Sunday head's up for you all, as Saberman has just informed us through Facebook, that a new game has been released for the Commodore Amiga as port of the X68000 shoot 'em up of 'Game.X' by hitchhikr SoftWorks. A game in which you need to destroy as many waves as possible to get the best of hiscores. To coincide with this news, Saberman has also done a video showing the game in action.
Frustratingly, even though the the game was originally released in 1990 by Kugenuma-Soft for the X68000, there's nothing about the game on the internet nor can I find anything via Youtube to do a decent write up! But what I can say is, if however you want to play the game on your Commodore Amiga, then head on over to the link (here) and check it out.
It would be a Doujin title from the 90's, which is the equivalent to indie or homebrew in Japan, which ever you might prefer to call it. The vast majority of Doujin titles were developed by home users and then given away for free across bulletin boards as a way of cutting their teeth for real game development. A portion of those titles were sold commercially if they gained enough attention and were usually sold in smaller gaming stores around Tokyo and elsewhere. Usually with black and white photocopied manuals and hand drawn cover art. I think Ultima I in the US had a similar story before it went big.
ReplyDeleteThe payoff for the Doujin developer was to prove their metal and build their rep either for the scene or as a way to build up their portfolio before applying for a job at a gaming studio. X68000 computer was often used as a development tool for developing pixel art for arcade titles or for consoles. X68000 monitor was capable of doing supporting 15hz, 24hz and 31hz resolution outputs, so it was adept at catering to different formats and downscaling assets. It was the development tool of choice for Capcom during it's boom years in the early and mid 90's and would've played a large role in the development of the Street Fighter 2 arcade and it's home conversions.
More than likely Game.X is a game that was released in the wild on a bulletin board with just the original developers name or street name but with no backstory or documentation, that was common with a lot of the lesser known Doujin titles. It's very difficult to find the back story to some of these games, but oddly they often appear as sale items for collectors on Japan web marketplaces if all the original games assets - disk, labels, manuals and box (if there was one) are in tact.
Wow! That's some write up dude and impressive knowledge as well! Thank you for doing that :)
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