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1993-05-31
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53 lines
STOS - WHAT DO THE SOFTWARE COMPANIES THINK?
STOS began life somewhere back in the 1980's, and even I must say that
it was pretty dismal compared to it's power today. The only extension
was the PICTURE COMPACTOR which allowed you to pack or unpack degas or
neochrome pictures. Apart from this, it still had it's 320-odd commands
and proved to be the simplest language to use.
Over the years, it has been upgraded, extensions written for it,
source written for it, packages written for it (compiler, 3D, maestro),
and other commercial packages have supported it. Today, it is arguably
superior to GFA Basic. But, is that what the software companies think?
Well, unfortunately I have not been able to write letters to
representatives of companies, but you do not really need to go to those
lengths to guess at the answer.
Software companies are trying to get a good image for themsleves. "We
are really clever because all of our programmers know Devpac 3
backwards!" So? There ARE such things as crap assembler games you
know! (no names, of course!)
An author of a STOS game I know contacted a small software company to
try and market it. According to what he wrote in his scrolltext later
on, he phoned them up and asked them whether they would be interested
in a shoot-'em-up written in STOS. Of course, they refused, saying that
STOS games would only lower the standards of the company, and besides,
he had to admit that STOS games were pretty poor. The conversation
ended there. The cheek! He hadn't even seen the game yet! So anyway,
this guy decided to send the game in and see if he could change their
minds...
A couple of months later, he received a letter saying something like:
"We thoroughly tested your STOS (urgh!) game and found it to be rather
better than what we expected of this package. Unfortunately, it still
does not meet up to our marketing standards and so we will not include
it under our label. Thanks anyway."
Apparently, this STOS (urgh!) game was better than any other game
marketed under the software company's label. The author said that they
probably didn't even give it a thorough testing because they knew it
wouldn't be included because of the language it was written in! Damn
cheek!
So far, (apart from some exceptions), STOS seems to be surviving only
on the Public Domain scene, although on the contrary, I am glad to say
that it seems to be slowly dominating the games section! If only large
companies would turn a searching eye to the STOS side of games - maybe
we could revolutionise the games industry! Who knows?
Article: BLACK EAGLE 31/5/93