Brotikasten/BROTCD01.iso/vortex/history.txt

Text File | 1995-03-27 | 12KB | 204 lines

The History of VORTEX Software
by
Mark Haigh-Hutchinson
Version 1.0 March 1995

Like many software houses in the 1980s, VORTEX began as a hobby. Costa Panayi first
got interested in computing back in 1982. Whilst working as a mechanical engineer for
British Aerospace he brought home a Sinclair ZX81, played around for a bit, then starting
writing programs for it.
After learning BASIC, Costa and his friend Paul Canter wrote a number of programs that
they then sent to Michael Orwin, of Orwin Software. "It was a collection of programs,
Mastermind, Pontoon, Othello, and Awari. We were quite chuffed. You wouldn't believe
it, he's still sending us money!" Costa would recall in 1984. "The 1K machine was really
useful for learning how to be efficient. To begin with it was quite difficult to see how you
could write games."
Costa then started learning machine code from books such as Toni Baker's æMastering
Machine Code on your ZX81Æ. The first game using these techniques was COSMOS. He
and Canter set up VORTEX and decided to sell games themselves. Then the ZX
Spectrum appeared and sales of COSMOS rapidly dropped off. They quickly converted
the game to the 16K Spectrum, including colour and sound but a little deterred by their
first experience, licensed the game to another company.
Costa next began work on ANDROID ONE - which was when his brother-in-law Luke
Andrews became involved. "It was a natural progression for VORTEX" Luke explained,
who was a craft's teacher at the time. "I'd handled money working as a teacher and I used
to have my own furniture making company." Crete Panayi, Costa's brother helped with
the advertising side of the business.
From Costa's earliest games he developed a number of concepts that would be carried
forward from game to game, starting with the scrolling techniques. "For ANDROID
ONE we tried to produce a game with a lot of features. We used the scrolling techniques
to produce a long corridor, and designed a few rooms, then tried to get something running
about the screen," Costa remembers.
ANDROID ONE became a popular success, and was sold through W. H. Smith. The
sequel, ANDROID TWO, took the action further with a much larger playing area. "I
wanted to do a sequel which had something special about it. That's why I developed the
3D effect. It was our first 48K game, and took me about 9 months to write. It was
released just before Christmas 1983." Costa was still working at British Aerospace during
this period. "The game became so complex. The millipods caused problems. Most people
used dark backgrounds but we decided to use the BRIGHT colours. The other thing was
the wraparound maze." In the end the effort certainly paid off.
"I was tempted to do ANDROID THREE" he recalls, "But I decided to leave it for
another day." Then came TORNADO LOW LEVEL.
"TLL was really a progression of the ideas in ANDROID TWO. I expanded on the 3D
landscape, making the wraparound more complex. There is an extra dimension as the
plane isn't always on the ground." TLL became a big hit in the summer of 1984. One
aspect of the game that Costa was particularly proud of was the shadow cast by the plane.
When you fly over a building the shadow climbs up the wall, which, if you think about it,
means suddenly it has to move faster than the plane to keep up. "It took a bit of doing,
that" Costa says, smiling quietly.
That summer Costa left British Aerospace to concentrate full-time on programming. His
next game would take the form of CYCLONE, another flying game but featuring a play
area much bigger than that of TLL. This time the player would control a helicopter rather
than a plane.
On finishing CYCLONE, VORTEX moved into offices based in Salford on the
NorthWest edge of Manchester. Prior to that they had worked out of Luke's home in Sale.
I still can remember visiting Luke late in 1984 and as he opened the door all I could see
were enormous stacks of CYCLONE cassettes. There were 35,000 to be exact. The next
week they had all been sold...
At that time VORTEX was using a company called Ablex to do their cassette duplication
and Costa invited me to go with him to supervise the mastering of CYCLONE. As we
were waiting for the first master tapes to be duplicated someone at Ablex showed us a
game that had just been mastered a few days previously. The game was KNIGHT LORE
by ULTIMATE PLAY THE GAME -- and it had a profound effect on us both.
Costa returned home and then spent the next nine months developing completely new 3D
techniques -- the result was HIGHWAY ENCOUNTER. As such, HIGHWAY was the
third "isometric" game ever to be developed on a home computer, the first being ANT
ATTACK by Sandy White. HIGHWAY, though, was much faster than either of the first
two as well as combining both puzzle and action elements.
After HIGHWAY Costa wanted to come up with something completely different again.
Since I was now working full-time for VORTEX it was decided that I should write
ALIEN HIGHWAY whilst Costa developed his new ideas. I had previously written
ANDROID ONE for the Amstrad CPC (in my spare time at University) and then
converted HIGHWAY ENCOUNTER to the CPC in 8 weeks after graduation. ALIEN
HIGHWAY attempted to retain the essence of the original game yet expand the
gameplay and introduce a random element into the game. It was also considerably faster
than the original.
The result of Costa's efforts was REVOLUTION, an abstract isometric puzzle game. It
was designed with lastability in mind -- each time the game starts the puzzles are shuffled
between levels as well as their locations within the level. "Shifting the puzzles round and
creating a new landscape, or set of levels, each time you start play - itÆs trying to make
the game something more than other games on the market" Luke would say at the time.
"Even with our old games, you always had the first level, second level, third level, and so
on. ALIEN HIGHWAY, the remix of HIGHWAY ENCOUNTER started us thinking
that way, and with REVOLUTION I think the changes in the puzzle and landscapes are
the main attraction. If someone picks up the game and can't get past the first level, then
the game can be played on level one and the player still gets thirty new puzzles - so you
can still enjoy it, even if you never get past the first level!". REVOLUTION also marked
the first game that would be published outside of VORTEX. Unfortunately although
critically acclaimed it did not receive the success it deserved.
After REVOLUTION I left VORTEX to pursue my own career but Costa continued to
produce (albeit slowly) some excellent games. Next on the list would be DEFLEKTOR,
an completely original abstract puzzle game. Based around a very simple concept,
DEFLEKTOR like all great puzzle games has an enormous depth of gameplay that
proves extremely addictive. It was inspired by a science program that Costa had seen
about lasers. DEFLEKTOR was published by Gremlin Graphics who also converted the
game to the 16-bit Atari ST and Commodore Amiga. However, those conversions simply
did not stand up against the original Spectrum version.
CostaÆs last adventure into games programming would be HOSTILE ALIEN
TERRAIN ENCOUNTER or H.A.T.E for short. A remarkable piece of programming,
H.A.T.E. pushed the Spectrum to limit - a smooth-scrolling diagonal play area with lots
of aliens to fight. Another great game that was well received but unfortunately did not
receive the success it should have.
The next two years would be quiet time for VORTEX -- Costa was ôburned-outö from
his many years of programming and spent the time deciding where he wanted to go from
there.
I had always kept in touch with Costa and Luke, and in the summer of 1990 VORTEX
was reborn with the intent of once more becoming a premier software developer. Our
initial plan was to develop a game for the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga that would
then fund us to develop something really exciting. We embarked upon producing a much
enhanced version of HIGHWAY ENCOUNTER for both the m