A hugely popular game from the Bitmap Bros on the Amiga and other 16-bit systems done way back in around 1991. Famous not only for the game itself, but for the ethical music score for the game.
In the year 2000, work was started on a C64 conversion, and a site was put up to show progress.
Eventually a intro was launched, which contained some reasonable titles and a reasonable conversion of the GODS theme tune. Sadly there was nothing playable, until much later..
Before the site disapeared, the team released a small preview of the map, and slightly playable version of level 1. Sadly, no-one seems to have this anymore, and therefore the intro is all that currently remains. Their website originally said the following:
“As you can see this is the Entire map to level 1-1, This is just the background map, ther are another 2 maps that go with this as each level is bult with 3 layers of maps, thay are a background map, Interactive map & a baddie map, the interactive map is a map that contains things like AI pointers and switches, then of course the baddie map contains all the baddie locations and paths
Look out for a playable level1-1 demo comming very soon.”
It’s unknown how far exactly the game reached before being scrapped, though it seems it never really made it past level 1. It’s not known either why the game was scrapped.
Thanks to the Wayback machine, we found the webpage that Godz used to be on, and this is what they had…
“MERRY XMAS – SPECIAL DOWNLOAD
The above download, is a WIP from 3 months ago, The Final version is A Whole FUCKLOAD nicer We are releasing this OLD demo now to keep scene intrest.
Unzip, load the PRG into real or emulated 64 and type SYS 32768 (Return)
Feel Free to Email us about this, But keep in mind this is in no way a current wip. Alot of changes have been made since. Merry Christmas to every c64/128 freak out there. We are nearing the end of godz production, Phew! its been hard Everything is done, Music, Gfx, Code, AI, Its all there, However as we have played it to death we dont know if its to hard or not hard enough anymore we need testers. so to make the selection process fair we have a plan :)
All you have to do is download our christmas greetingtro. load it up on your fave emulator (we recommend WinVice 1.6) and follow the instructions, it tells you all you need to know
Shortly after the festive season our new website will open up with the first public release of Godz. Hex (Me) is busy doing all the website material now (lots of shockwave).”
There was some rumours that Godz hasn’t been stopped, and a source quoted Hexlord as saying “Two of my colleguaes work on it without me, but the develpoment speed is slowing down.We are working always on GODS, we dont give up the idea. I am working twice than before, and we will put up one new webpage with a demo with 3 levels.”
The guys were originally asking for beta-testers, with Hexlord saying, “If you will be a betatester, you should donwload the christmas intro, from the Nomad Projects site, and the first sentence should be decoded, and the people behind the first 10 answer, get a copy of the betaversion, for testing purpose. (They are denied to copy and spread it.)”
Hopefully contacts can be made and we may find out what actually happened with the exciting development. We did find some possible leads to people who may have downloaded the map preview, but sadly they no longer had anything.
Someone must know where these guys are now, and someone must have obtained a demo or a movable map?
A lot of people seemed to think that Gods was no more than a fake production to drum up some interest in the scene. However, we had recent contact from a guy called Andy who had spoken to Hexl0rd and had seen a lot of the game. He confirms that it was not a fake, and Hexl0rd had put a heck of a lot of work and effort into producing a decent conversion. He had played a couple of versions before Christmas when they disappeared and it was shaping up very nicely – the only downpoint was the washed out graphics which were to be addressed.
According to Andy, Hexl0rd was struggling with the AI and sprite multiplexer in particular – maybe this was to be the downfall of the game?
Sadly Andy is no longer in touch with Hexl0rd and would not know how – but he has offered the hope that he may still have the previews of the game in various forms, so we keep our fingers crossed that he can uncover them for GTW to put out and preserve!
Excellent progress so far – but what of Hexl0rd … is he still out there?
Contributions: Andy
