1991 Rainbow Arts
Platforms: Atari ST, Commodore Amiga and PC
Not to be confused with the recent Psytronik release of the same name, Rotator was a one/two player tank game, where you would have to link a number of generators together to boost their flagging power. This is due to an alien invasion which is disrupting the world’s energy systems, and has thrown civilisation into chaos.
The impressive feature from the game would be a vertically split screen mode, with a play area that can be rotated in a Mode 7 like fashion. As you try to link up the generators, you would have a trail of cable left behind you – which would have tension the further you stretch, slowing you down and causing problems whilst trying to navigate around obstacles such as trees and bridges.
What is interesting is that the game was listed as being developed for the Atari ST and PC, as well as Amiga. No doubt the Amiga and PC were up to doing the rotational effects, but would the ST have fared as well?
Overall the game would be played across 32 levels, with 16-colour real-time zoom and rotating effects, digital speech and 6 in-game soundtracks. The game was seemingly complete, as Amiga Joker magazine would review the game, giving it a respectable 77%. It seems that although using a ground breaking effect, the game itself didn’t quite live up to it.
However, although reviewed by at least one magazine, the game would disappear completely and was never to be heard of again. We don’t quite know why at this stage, and its very much early days – but we hope to find the developers and see if something of this intriguing title could be recovered.
Contributor Andreas Altenheimer suggests that the review from Amiga Joker should be handled with caution, and may have been fabricated potentially. The review may have came from just discussions with developers and seeing early footage. That is something to consider anyway.
Thanks to Professor Chaos, we learn that Karsten Obarski was the musician for the game, as he informed that he composed music for the game in a 2001 interview. It seems that he did at least three songs for the game in his non-public “Synthpack“. If is hoped that possibly Karsten might be able to dig out some of his work to share – but we’ll see.
If you know anything more, please do get in touch.
Thanks to Karl Kuras for the heads up about the title and Professor Chaos for information about the musician and Andreas Altenheimer for discussion about the review.
Gallery
In a December 2001 interview, Karsten Obarski casually listed a game called “Rotator”, twice even: https://amp.dascene.net/detail.php?view=3982&detail=interview
Going by that, he did at least three songs that he still had/has, NOT in his famous Soundtracker/MOD format, but his non-public “Synthpack”: https://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/Synth_Pack
He also scored three other Rainbow Arts games earlier, so that checks out.
Karsten seems to keep himself very private, though.
Thanks Professor Chaos! Added details to the page about the musician and with the links too. Hopefully Karsten might be up for some day sharing his works.
That review from Amiga Joker should be handled with caution. The magazine was quite popular in germany and an interesting alternative to the “grand daddys” of german game journalists (aka ASM and Happy Computer/Power Play). But some of there reviews felt very suspicious, because they published them one month before or even earlier than every other magazine.
And in the case of the infamous Adventure Jonathan, which they reviewed two years (!!!) before everyone else and with an extremely high rating, they even admitted: Some reviews were based on talks with the developer and seeing footage within the development stage.
We can’t be sure, if this was also the case with Rotator. But it looks that way, because the review from Amiga Joker is the only one in the whole world and like Jonathan, it’s a game from a german developer.
Thanks Andreas for the heads up. I have added a note to the write up to reflect this, and so it can be taken with caution about the review.