GTW presents a first ever look at another GTW which has been gathering dust for some years now. This time a game by Markus Schneider, who worked at Bones Park and is famous also for his incredible music (Including my favourite, "Intruder").
Software Manager has kindly been shown to the world thanks to Markus, who converted his old disks and is happy for people to see some of his unfinished works for the first time. It is a management game (if you hadn’t already guessed) which is not based around your average Football season, but infact running your own software house! It’s rather similiar to the likes of "Millionaire" on the Spectrum, and "Software Star" on the C64, but with some rather nice presentation and graphics to bring it right up to date. It is the kind of quality you would expect from Markus.
The game has been sneaked out before now, and already exists in Gamebase. We are not sure just yet if this is an earlier version though. It has been translated roughly into English. The version we present to you for the first time is the very last version, untranslated in German from Markus himself.
Unfortunately I do not speak any German at all, and the game is fully in German. So I am half reviewing blindly when I talk of the game. Markus tells GTW that the game is unfinished, but you can actually play the game. You have to employ programmers, musicians, artists and then manage the production of various game titles across many platforms. From the English version i’ve included in the archive, the game is quite simple and enjoyable, even though this isn’t quite my cup of tea. It’s got some good humour in it which signifies that it could have been a nice entertaining piece of software had it been completed.
CP Verlag were to be the publishers, and the title was to be published on the Magic Disk label. Sadly around the time the game was being worked on, Markus was drawn into the army, and so the game was shelved. By the time Markus came out of the army, the C64 had commercially died and so the game was indefinately shelved. Overall the game was at a 85% approximate completion state, which is what we show you today.
Irfan additionally did a lot of graphics which were not included, and you can find screenshots of these. Hopefully they’ll also be in the archives by the time you read this too for you to look at on a real C64 or through emulation.
It is great to be able to preserve this game, and we hope you will enjoy examining it. Feel free to leave comments in the GTW forum for Markus about the game if you wish.
A nice software management sim for your c64…
Contributions: Markus Schneider
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Preview_Software.zip (zip)
Gallery
Creator speaks
Markus Schneider speaks to GTW about work on Software Manager...
"It is called Software Manager. The state is unfinished but it's possible to play the game, although it's in German.
The idea behind was a type of a managing game. The player needs to employ programmers, musicians, graphic artists and so on to produce computer games. Also advertisement needs to be controlled as much as getting the infrastructure for the personal.
The graphics was done by Irfan Celik. He is now working in the USA at a bigger graphic arts company in California called Blur."
Markus Schneider.
