John: How does suddenly getting recognition on this project now feel?

Metin: I almost can’t express how joyful it is to witness all the emerging love for Moon Child and our other games. It’s a wonderful, surreal, wild ride, and it pretty much makes up for the repeated bad luck we experienced during our game development years. We’re much enjoying it while it lasts.

John: What previous media inspired the gameplay of Moon Child? Games for the gameplay, of course, but the look as well?

Metin: We all came from a Commodore 64 and 8-bit game console background and played lots of games before starting to develop our own games, but in the case of Moon Child, our goal was improving upon what we did before, when we created our preceding Amiga platform game called Hoi, which was published in 1992 after a delay, and was surrounded by bad luck with publishers.

For Moon Child‘s look I was inspired by the magical nightly atmosphere of a 1991 Capcom arcade game called Midnight Wanderers, which was part of an arcade cabinet featuring three games, collectively called Three Wonders. Next to this, another Capcom game is among my all-time favorites: the Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins and Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts series, also featuring a nightly, spooky atmosphere in a cartoonish style.

John: How was the development process back then compared to today? Do you think it’s better or worse now?

Metin: Well, we have been ripped off by publishers three times during our game development years. Those early years of the digital revolution were like the Wild West of game development. I guess the most painful experience surrounded the development and release of Moon Child‘s predecessor Hoi…

Hoi would first be published by the US-based publisher Innerprise Software, formerly known as Discovery Software International, famous for the classic Amiga games Hybris, Battle Squadron and Sword of Sodan.

In 1991, when Hoi was about 60 percent finished, Innerprise Software asked us to send them the latest version of the game, for internal evaluation and testing purposes. About three weeks later the Hoi version we sent to Innerprise turned out to have been leaked to the Amiga hacker Fairlight, and was rapidly being copied by Amiga users around the world.

We cancelled our agreement with Innerprise and found a new publisher, also in the US: Hollyware Entertainment, formerly known as MicroIllusions, publisher of The Faery Tale Adventure and Music-X.

But following the release of Hoi, Hollyware never paid us any royalties apart from an initial $200 cheque “for the release celebration party”. As we were three young chaps in a different part of the world, we did not have the resources to legally fight the lack of proceeds from our hard work. It was a deception that would occur again after the release of our puzzle game Clockwiser by the UK publisher Rasputin Software.

Both Hoi and Clockwiser were received warmly by the international game press, which made the events with the publishers even more sour.

Subsequently, we were determined to create a new, better platform game, featuring an elf-like character, and the Hoi character as an automated sidekick. But by the time we had completed the Amiga demo version, Commodore went bankrupt, and the Amiga’s future became uncertain. As we still hadn’t earned money with our games, we got the opportunity to start a semi-independent game development division at a local multimedia company. There, we reinitiated Moon Child for Windows, finally getting paid for our work, and we took advantage of certain PC hardware capacities to double the game’s resolution. We decided to leave away the Hoi character, and focus on Moon Child.

When Moon Child had just been released in the Netherlands, bad luck struck again though, because the company had invested heavily in Philips CD-i authoring hardware and software, which turned out to become a flop. By the time Moon Child would be published internationally, the publishing department was discontinued. So Moon Child remained stuck in a Netherlands-only release.

Later, we found out that the game had been living a life of its own in the worldwide piracy circuit, and through the years I’ve been receiving e-mails every now and then from people expressing the childhood joy Moon Child delivered, which is really heart-warming.

Reading the very sympathetic response of the current game dev community to Moon Child (and Hoi), I sense a connection between what we experienced with game publishers and the current state of the game publishing world, which is increasingly enshittifying, for example with the adoption of generative “AI”.

John: Were there any specific influences for the theme song? Why did the composer take the direction they took with it?

Metin: Ramon Braumuller, our composer, started playing drums at age six and joined bands by the age of twelve. In the early 1990s, he and his brother Ruud produced House music in their small studio. They were named ‘The R.’ Ramon thinks the blend of those House music influences and the Amiga demo-scene tracker music formed the foundation for the Moon Child track. He also sang the vocals in the Moon Child Amiga demo title track, using old school gear to realize the chorus: ADAT multitrack-recording onto VHS tape, then sampled the mix into the Amiga.

John: How’d it feel working on a traditional platformer in the wake of the shift to 3D, whether you knew it was coming?

Metin: I clearly remember that formed a growing dilemma for us back in the 1990s, when Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake were accelerating the attention of gamers to 3D gaming. I started practicing 3D creation in 3D Studio MAX (as 3ds Max was still called in the 1990s), but our coder, Reinier van Vliet, was hesitant to make the switch from 2D to 3D coding, and I don’t blame him. It’s literally an extra dimension you need to handle. Back in the 1990s there were no prefabricated 3D engines you could adopt.

In the course of the 1990s, after the Moon Child release had [been] stranded in the Netherlands, we decided to shift towards multimedia development: CD-ROM games and applications for companies and brands.

John: Which of the memes has been your favorite, and did having something you made find an audience in such a different way 30 years later take you off guard?

Metin: I love just about every piece of Moon Child themed expression I see on Bluesky, but I think I like the whimsical animated parodies made by Bluesky user LVL?KEN / @ricesnot.bsky.social the most.

(Note from John: Ricesnot/Icesnort is a great YTP creator/vidsmith and I’d recommend all of his work. He’s also part of a dev team called Gravy Crew Games that recently released a game called Rules and Rodents.)

Witnessing our games getting so much love and warm responses is a genuine emotional experience after we spent around ten years creating games without a real breakthrough that would have allowed us to keep creating games. After reading the positive reviews of our games in the game magazines of the early 1990s, our frustration grew when we turned out to deal with yet another unreliable publisher.

John: Was Moon Child going to evolve beyond the game if it took off? Do you have ideas for the character, or was it a design first? How has the fan response changed him as a character for you, if at all?

Metin: We always liked to fantasize about people wearing suits of our characters at games conventions, haha. And of course we would have liked to get rich with merchandise and big commercial deals, such as “Moon Child: The Movie” haha. But in the end, the sheer fun we had creating games together, inspiring each other and reading positive reviews in our favorite game magazines at the time was priceless and lasts a lifetime.

And the fan response is just wonderful. Moon Child has suddenly become the iconic character I wished he would become back in the 1990s. I created the first version of Moon Child back in 1991, when we had just experienced the setback from the first publisher, Innerprise. Later I streamlined his appearance to match the speed of Moon Child‘s scrolling. Never would I have thought that he would be elevated to fame more than 30 years later. Life can be full of surprises.

John: If Moon Child was voiced, who would you like to play him?

Metin: Oof, tough question… Sylvester Stallone, haha? Maybe Jim Carrey? In the days we made games, game characters didn’t talk yet, haha.

John: You released the source code and a level editor. Why was that your response to this sudden popularity? What do you want to see done with this now public?

Metin: When the second Hoi game publisher turned out to be unreliable, we decided to release Hoi to the Amiga users for free in 1993, released as a remix version with some minor improvements. It felt good to do that. Money isn’t everything, and we loved the idea that many Amiga users would get to know the game we had been developing for more than a year.

When Moon Child went viral on Bluesky, we wanted to do something similar: to return the appreciation of the gaming community by releasing the source files and assets, so anyone can have fun with the game, make ports, mods, etcetera. We can’t wait to see what people will create with Moon Child.

John: What is Moon Child’s perfect Sunday?

Metin: Chilling in his natural environment, sitting next to his pal Hoi, while chuckling at the funny Moon Child memes on the internet.

John: What is the team doing these days? Anything you want to share?

Metin: Around 2000, I returned to freelancing and became a magazine illustrator, newspaper cartoonist and toy modeler. I’ve also worked as a Technical Artist for the Blender Foundation for a while, which is based in Amsterdam, not very far from my hometown.

Reinier returned to game development for a number of years in the early 2000s, shifting to mobile games. We made one more game together for a company he worked at in the early 2000s, a China-themed game called Yin Hung for the Nokia N-Gage. After that, Reinier moved on to creating apps for banks, and these days he’s guiding other coders in the same field.

Ramon plays the drums in a popular Dutch party band, and creates soundtracks for high-profile Minecraft content creators on YouTube.

The three of us are still friends, frequently messaging each other, and going out for dinner every once in a while.

If you wish to play Moon Child for yourself, the game is available to be played in-browser here, or downloaded from Archive.org.

The post The Second Life of Moon Child – A Conversation with Metin Seven appeared first on Gamesline.

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John: What is Polymega’s mission statement for their console? There are plenty of enthusiast consoles coming to market, such as the Analogue consoles. How does yours stand out from the crowd?

Bryan Bernal: Polymega’s mission is to move retro games forward into the future by making them as modern and accessible as possible for all types of players. Polymega’s standout features compared to other systems will probably most easily be identified as its in-the-box support for optical disc based game systems such as PS1, Sega CD, Sega Saturn, TurboGrafx-CD, and Neo Geo CD. Further, Polymega has a patented modular design which means we don’t have to recreate the core hardware each time we release a new module, which is something you need to do with other systems, which saves players money and keeps their homes tidy and organized. Finally, Polymega has placed great emphasis on delivering an interface that provides a satisfyingly modern experience not unlike those you’ve come to expect from content providers like Netflix and Hulu. In this way, Polymega is more accessible to younger generations of players who may have trouble navigating unfamiliar interfaces and lists of games.

J: What was the development cycle like for the console? What is it like creating a video game console in 2019?

B: The development cycle of Polymega was highly iterative and one that required a significant amount of restraint, discipline, and perseverance in the face of considerable challenges. Both a blessing and a curse, designing a modular product that might need to contain certain features or behave a certain way years before its put to use is extremely difficult. I believe Polymega itself is different enough from other game consoles that the challenges which we face are fairly unique to our own situation, and could not be compared to other consoles which may be released in 2019. One thing we probably share is that we constantly keep our eye on emerging tech to see what ways it can be used to get closer to our goals. Just as we know other companies are watching us, and probably learning from our designs to help them be more competitive in the future – either with us or with other products.

J: Could you elaborate a bit on the development cycle? What were some things that maybe had to be cut? Could you see them returning in future updates?

B: Some of the things that had to be deprioritized to make way for more critical launch features are Twitch streaming in the box, removal of the social media / oauth-based features for launch, and the Atari module. We’d definitely like to re-surface these as possibilities in the future, though.

J: What improvements should people expect for the games you can play on the console? Are there any specific games that, when played on the Polymega, impressed or excited you?

First, Polymega owners can expect a highly capable game console, using emulators, which requires no setup. This in and of itself is a huge problem and barrier to entry for many people who wish to enjoy retro game cartridges and CD’s but may not have the time or patience to dive into the vast world of PC building and emulation tweaking. As for the quality of the games, we’ve legally licensed what we feel are the best emulators available on the market where possible — and configured them to take advantage of our hardware to provide the best bang for the buck experience you can get anywhere, with a very high degree of compatibility for systems which are traditionally difficult to emulate, such as 32x and Sega Saturn. I’m personally most excited to collect and play Neo Geo CD games, which load significantly faster than the original hardware and are significantly more affordable (and take less space) than Neo Geo AES games. The improved load times are an example of where the modernization of a system is more important than the preservation of its historical play experience.

J: Does Polymega support any accessories not made by you? If not, is there any plan to update to that eventually?

B: Yeah there’s a ton of 3rd party accessories we support which are not made by us. For example, the Polymega is compatible with official controller accessories from Sega such as the Retro-Bit USB Saturn Controller, and the Neo Geo Mini Pad and Neo Geo X Arcade Stick. It’s also compatible with the PS1 Classic controller. We’ll continue to add support for high quality 3rd party accessories as well as continue to flesh out our own offerings for players as time progresses.

J: Will there be future updates to the system to allow for more consoles? What other kind of support should consumers expect in the months after the console’s release?

B: Absolutely. We have a large backlog of features we want to roll out to players once Polymega is in the players hands. I think there’s a lot to be excited about and players should know that we’re thinking very far ahead in terms of support for the system. New CD system support, modules for hard to emulate systems, a new marketplace experience, enhancements to classic games, new game content, and more.

J: You mention new game content. Can you be more specific in what that means? Updates to older games? Brand new titles that fit hardware specs for older consoles?

B: Right now we’re interested in releasing updated versions of older games which may include translations and graphical enhancements, new games for old systems (like those made with NESMaker). In the future, we may explore new modern games for Polymega which utilize the full capabilities of the hardware.

J: Last question: Can the Polymega run Phillips CD-I games?

B: We don’t have any announcements to make about CD-I at this moment. But it is possible for the future. Thanks!

From what this interview has revealed, the Polymega has a lot of promise. It’s a bit difficult to see how much of that promise holds up to scrutiny, since I personally haven’t played it yet, but recent videos from a demo at Retro Game Camp in LA excite me. A faster, more elegant way to play CD-based retro titles is welcome in my book, but it’s hard to see through the spin so far. Hopefully once more people get their hands on the console, we’ll be able to fully judge it, and I do wish it’s fantastic.

The post A Conversation with Polymega appeared first on Gamesline.

SNK’s 40th Anniversary Collection contains a lot more than what you’d expect from an old game developer’s catalog. It is more than a simple check-off list of old arcade games people might want to see ported to current-gen consoles. When we think of archival work in video games, it’s usually companies like Namco or Sega putting a bunch of games with mascots in them on a disc for advertising purposes, or if we’re lucky it’s an HD upgrade of an old game that you aren’t sure if it ever really existed like Lizardcube’s incredible 2017 remake of, “Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap”. The worst case scenario for game preservation are those plastic joysticks that you get at the department store for fifty bucks that just have a bunch of old games like Pole Position or Centipede or Star Fox 2 loaded on to them. Look, those are essentially trash toys whose only practical preservational use is to turn one corner of your local bar into a barcade for a few weeks until folks get bored and go back to playing darts. With SNK’s 40th Anniversary Collection, Frank Cifaldi’s team at Digital Eclipse have put together something more than a games collection, but a digital archival format that should be absolutely inspiring for all of us who are asking: “how do we preserve the history of video games for future generations?”

so SNK 40th is legit and there is a lot happening here. Let’s get the features list out of the way: It has a complete timeline with museum-esque notes on the context of each work, each emulated game has some simple emulation functions (save state, load, etc) but also has a rewind button that undoes your moves (especially helpful for all the quarter-sucking technical shooters), also there is a longplay of every game that you can just watch and scrub through at your leisure, including all 151 minutes of SNK’s rarely developed brand of RPG: Crystalis. You can run the Japanese & Western versions of almost every game. Any of the games that had a console release also has that version available to play which helps compare and contrast how development worked between arcade and console. And on top of it all there are changeable resolutions, including an arcade cabinet-esque portrait mode! Did you see our video showing off Fangamer’s Flip Grip for the Nintendo Switch? We are watching a games collection swag on the very hardware it was built for!

Currently, there are fourteen games in the collection, and each game not only feels like an important piece of the historical journey of SNK’s early development but a lot of them are dang fun! My personal highlights were getting to play Vanguard, Alpha Mission, and Prehistoric Island and getting to see SNK’s space shooter evolve. Also, Athena has aged really well and was incredibly impressive for how much is going on in such a small space. Then you get to jump from that to Psycho Soldier and get to see them start using their mascot characters to do some cool experimenting! Also, all three Ikari Warriors are on here in both arcade and console version, which not only show how SNK improved technologically over a short period of time but also just how dedicated they were to worldwide markets with these heavily Western-coded Hollywood style War Hero Games.

Everything curated in the 40th Anniversary Collection is SNK before the Neo-Geo in 1990, which means no Fatal Fury, King of Fighters, or Metal Slug; but that’s actually a good thing for a couple of reasons. One, all of the games curated from this era were designed and built on similar philosophical and historical foundations: games designed for coin-op arcade machines that were planned towards being translated to English and usually ported to NES for western home markets. Two, you get to see the roots for all of SNK’s bigger franchises in isolation. When you combine the tank from TNKIII, the dual weapons and co-op from Ikari Warriors or P.O.W, and the hostages from Guerilla War, you basically get Metal Slug.

—

Also, hey this is a big aside, but SNK made a game where you play as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara to overthrow the US’s Bautista regime in 1950s Cuba with the exact same engine and style that Ikari Warriors used to represent Rambo-esque flaming romps through fascist-occupied jungles. I repeat- it’s a game where you are Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, as super soldiers, liberating Cuba! They made this entire game after having read and been inspired by “Guerilla Warfare” Guevara’s treatise on warfare and revolution within the Americas. The dev team had never been to Cuba even though at one point a trip for the team was planned. So like, late 80s SNK was real in to Communist theory or maybe just really heavy on some kind of 1950s jungle warfare kitsch. Either way SNK saw Che Guevara as real-life Rambo, games history is wack and SNK, welcome to the resistance?

—

Sorry, back to before I interrupted myself- So in the 90’s the Neo-Geo abruptly changed arcade development as we knew it with multiple games in one mass-produced arcade cabinet, and this SNK collection is like the moment right before all of that happened. So, I’m glad Fatal Fury and KoF aren’t in this collection because it more concisely tells a story in isolation about Japanese Game Development in the 1980s. Hopefully, this also allows for a Neo-Geo collection to come out later as a second volume based on this collection. And if it is anything with the level of detail that this archive has, that would be incredible! Just like a second volume to an encyclopedia series, but interactive!

There continues to be a desperate cry for multiple formats of games archival as games that are the fundamental building blocks of the current generation are getting lost to time. The best that we’ve got right now is Nintendo condensing eras of history into fifteen games and putting them on a proprietary plastic emulator box like the SNES Classic. The best we’ve got now is begging Sega to port Dreamcast games to the Nintendo Switch (some of which can’t be ported because that data has already been lost). The best we’ve got is any ROMs that can still be scraped off the web after Nintendo is done trying to destroy all history of games. (Is that weird that Nintendo is kinda the hinge on all games’ history? That’s weird right? I feel like that’s weird.) None of that is archival or historical preservation because of how it has been perverted by commercialism without adding any kind of context about where, when, or how it came to exist. Nintendo especially tries to make it feel like their games just magically appeared one day, divorced from any kind of human labor or historical context. This SNK 40th Anniversary collection can’t fix all of that, but at least it provides a strong formula for putting archival work up front-and-center and giving everyone context for how these games came to exist. Historical context and concise curation are the forces that help differentiate SNK’s collection from an average commercial release like the Megaman Legacy Collection

Okay I’m gonna blow your mind right now cuz all of that stuff is cool, but there’s something in here that is some like Doc Brown “You’re about to see some serious shit” kind of shit because you see these longplay videos? At any point in the longplay video I can just **BAM** I’m playing now from this point in the longplay.    That’s right, this isn’t actually video at all but an emulated series of inputs! IT’S A GODDAMN TOOL-ASSISTED SPEEDRUN THAT YOU CAN TAKE DIRECT CONTROL OF AT ANY POINT! That’s just incredible.

Anecdote time: I got stuck in Athena fighting a late-game boss that was impossible to kill because I didn’t have the right item from a previous level, so I went to the video, and it taught me how to kill that boss and a lot of the cool things I missed while playing, so I scrubbed the video past the boss that killed me, hit [Start Playing] and then started from there to beat the whole game. Later, I was watching Psycho Soldier but the game got so cool that I had to play it and beat it myself… You turn into a phoenix and shoot people with psychic lasers! This rules so hard.

Other highlights from playing through this include: Prehistoric Island the game where you kill gigantic, beautiful dinosaurs like a mega tyrannosaurus takes this sudden and wild twist ending…   Where everyone DIES? Okay! Thanks, F.B.I. director William Sessions. There is also Streetsmart whose ending is very American… Did you know that the world is going to end on October 1st, 1997? Crystalis did. They predicted that lightning bolt that smote the world. I love that even SNK’s Zelda clone has absolutely no chill. And I can’t forget mentioning Vanguard’s lazer-beam-eyeball man or any of the games’ end credits “Congratulations” screens. These really are special and lovely.

What’s amazing about all of this is that there is more coming in the form of DLC. And usually I’d be pretty derisive around games attempting to commodify their own histories, but due to how much good faith has already been built into SNK’s 40th that goodwill becomes respect and in the context of an archive this actually becomes a different beast altogether. With DLC in the works that continued support makes this into what historians call a “Living Archive”. The Sega Mega Collection that is currently on Steam also takes a similar approach where you can download the gamehub for free while the developers continue to add as many Genesis and Mega Drive games as they can to that digital platform and then you buy them in packs. I’m interested to see how long both of these formats can maintain their games collections for. The SNK collection currently exists only as a Switch game which means its lifespan is limited by the Switch’s hardware, meanwhile, Sega’s game hub is only a Steam application and thus is limited by… Steam. *shudders…* Digital purchases are always… fickle.

If you are studying game design then this game is a textbook for you. The curation of all of these games provide a framework for SNK’s design practices in the 80s:

1. The player is fragile and normally dies when an enemy touches them
2. The player can find power ups throughout the world that usually upgrade in two dimensions (offensive/defensive buffs and debuffs).
3. Players are rewarded for exploring (and usually destroying) the environment
4. Points are constantly and trivially tossed around for most any action that the player does.
5. Each game is overwhelmingly difficult but in a way that can be either assuaged by a second player or by collectible powerups that exponentially increase the power of the player. This is easily seen in Athena where you can upgrade all the way into getting a GIANT GODDAMN FIRE SWORD. 

All of these fundamentals make for a really satisfying core game loop regardless of the genre of game. Even if it’s one of SNK’s classic half-baked NES ports that look like pac-man vomit. Even those still play passably enough to be a good advertisement for the quarter-sucking arcade versions.

SNK’s 40th Anniversary Collection is chock-full of important lessons to teach us about Japanese game design from the 80s, it contains interesting and new ideas for preserving games, and it shows us one hell of an escalation in quality and technology from just 1981 to 1990. I’m excited to see how development proceeds going forwards. Will they try to squeeze in the big-name flagship properties like Metal Slug? Or will they maintain their course to archive as much of the 80s as possible and add games like Touch Down Fever? Also, what if this team Digital Eclipse expanded into more companies and we had a collection like this for every game company of the era? We could have a really strong set of encyclopedias exploring this period of games development! For now though, I’ll just take this as a sign that the 80s were entirely dominated by fantasies of Rambo, magical girls with swords, and Communism.

The post Videogame Preservation In 2018 & SNK’s 40th Anniversary Collection appeared first on Gamesline.

This ROM is a prototype of a fighting game that nobody knows anything about. There’s no title screen, the UI is half done, and most of the twelve planned characters don’t even have sprites. But this game has a unique gimmick that ties it to a very American franchise. Each character can swap between a Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic alignment that changes their sprites and attacks. This is an obvious reference to Dungeons and Dragons, but who knows if this was supposed to be a licensed DnD fighting game or if these labels were stand-ins for future alignments that wouldn’t get the developers sued.

USGamer’s Jeremy Parish took video of the prototype in action, but you can try it for yourself in MAME and read more straight from NeoTurfMasta here on the neo-geo.com forums. My guess is that this was a pitch for a DnD game that got turned down, and that’s why it was seemingly tossed aside.

The post An Unknown Neo Geo Game Has Been Uncovered appeared first on Gamesline.