Games That Weren't 64

Miha Rinne and Pekka speak about work on Undead...

"Undead was my first project I collaborated with a programmer. I was responsible for game design and artwork. The way I designed it was gleefully amateurish; I simply wanted it to be the epitome of everything I felt was cool at the time; (especially Splatterhouse coin-op and the movie 'Escape from New York'). So Undead was to be a mix of all these things.

We planned this to be a cartridge/1541 release, and few collaborators for the project were Sami Louko/Proton, who did the original disk loader routine which loaded more backgrounds while progressing, and Petri Reimann/Anvil, who did a great title tune. AMJ also collaborated with a
fantastic tune.

It took us a year to come up with a playable level, once we had that we sent it to Jukka Tapanimäki and asked if he could share some publisher contacts. Answer never came, but I think he was already retired at the time. I didn't yet know Stavros at the time, but when I showed him this demo years later, he just commented: 'Well. Someones have clearly had to code lot of animation there.' (he was never particularly flattering when it came to c64 products from other developers)

I got very fond memories on working on this game. What was great about Pekka that he was always able to somehow figure a way on how to do a feature I requested. I "did" have some idea on the basics what c-64 can do (8 sprites for horizontal maximum, etc) but I didn't really know how
hard it was to code it all in. But he was like a miracle man; I asked something, he did it! I don't think I ever had a collaborator like that ever since!

Anyway, it was certainly way too ambitious and it would have been a nightmare to complete, so it was just left to, eh, rot, until now when Triad contacted us and said they wanted to rescue it. This made us excited enough to dig through all the old archives again. What's maybe the best thing is that we still got all the workable source code, so if someone feels brave (or maybe mad) enough, they can try to develop this further. I can still make additional graphics and I still got all the original tools and equipment left, plus the design ideas and notes."

Miha Rinne.
May, 2006

"Undead was a game project that I participated in some 16 years ago. With great graphics and some nice technical tricks to it, the game had great potential. I still admire the graphics, especially the backgrounds, and some details like the hearts indicating player energy level. Technically it would have been impressive too, I'm not sure if anyone has ever done a C64 game with scrolling bitmaps as background graphics. Atleast I had not heard of such game way back then.

Programming the thing was challenging, with endless timing issues and the like. At some point I had to migrate programming work to Amiga, as compiling was just too slow on C64 due to large amount of source code that was involved. Actually one of the biggest problems was that the source was growing too big, it would not fit into the memory. Apparently I had'nt yet discovered that projects can have multiple source files, or maybe I just needed some excuse to buy more hardware ;)

Unfortunately the project was way too ambitious for two teenagers to complete, and the project was abandoned. But now after being buried for 15 years it seems that the Undead will live up to it's name. The dead walk!"

Pekka.