Tears of Rage was an RPG title talked about briefly within issues of both Commodore Format and Zzap!64 during the early 90’s. An up and coming game from U.S. Gold. Nothing was much known about the game until we heard from the developers themselves.
Fully titled as “The Rain, My tears of Rage” , the game was being programmed by Esprit Software Programs, initially on the C64 by Lance Mason, Paul Crawley & Mike Brown. It would have been a sort of upgraded version on the “Pool of Radiance” according to the team.
It had been rumoured to have been binned because it was such an immense job to convert from ST/Amiga and never got beyond the initial visual stages. The game however progressed quite well on the 16 bit machines, but as usual, Esprit was running well over deadline and budget when it was apparently cancelled by U.S. Gold.
However, both Lance and Paul got in contact and helped shed some light by giving their accounts (which you can see under “Creator Speaks”). Apparently the game’s engine blew away anything else that existed at the time.
Unfortunately Esprit were not allowed to use the AD&D licence that a US company had, which U.S. Gold had a contract with, therefore U.S. Gold canned production.
According to Paul, the company behind Eye Of The Beholder were not happy with what they were seeing, and saw an engine which could wipe the floor with theirs.
Paul suggests that U.S. Gold were the only people to have all the source code for the game, and so chances of finding anything could be hard.
However, Lance felt he still may have something and even found copies of the game on other formats. We are hoping to get hold of these at least to add to the site.
Contributions: Lance Mason, Steven Day, Paul Crawley
Supporting content
Creator speaks
Lance Mason speaks to GTW about work on Tears Of Rage…
“As far as Tears Of Rage is concerned: Once again, no luck on the C64, although I have found almost all the material on the other formats (including a load of old LBM’s which you’re welcome to if you wish). We have no idea why SSI pulled out of this one, although hearsay (from USG) indicated that our engine blew away their existing one, which they’d hoped to get more mileage from… Who knows.”
Lance Mason .
Paul Crawley speaks to GTW about work on Tears Of Rage…
“Tears of Rage, the real title being “The Rain, My tears of Rage” was dropped by USGOLD, purely because of the AD&D contract they had with a US company that were releasing AD&D titles at the time, I can’t remember there name but they also did “Eye of the Beholder”, This Company refused to allow us to use the AD&D licence, hence USGOLD didn’t release it, but trust me “Tears of Rage” and the Greyhawk world suffered greatly, here’s an example – “Eye of the Beholder” was in a 64X64 Dungeon, we had 16 Dungeons that were the same size.
We had a combat mode that showed Dragons etc at FULL size and a town mode (16 of them too) that was WAY advanced and a landscape mode that allowed the user to travel across the WHOLE Greyhawk world. That’s why it was canned, it was too advanced, it was better than anything ever seen, Gary Gigax even looked at it and said that it was the best representation of AD&D that he had ever seen. Politics stopped us, that’s the bottom line.
Bottom line, A classic game was canned because we did more and better than anyone had ever seen, they owned the source code at the time, hence it was never released. Talk to US GOLD if you need a demo.”
Paul Crawley.
easy to code now days, I was the c64 coder and still write games in my spare time for fun, landscape, towns and the cloud city that isn’t mentioned as well as the dungeons, hardest part was always waiting on graphics, Lance never understood that, make the blocks move he always used to say. Crystal Beacon was his best effort, today easy but he screwed that up by promising, as usual (“We can do that in three weeks”, no we never could!) ESP the company folded because of Lance Mason making impossible deadlines because he expected everyone to work 24/7 he was an ok coder at best and now takes pictures of his married model.
Tears could be written and published in about 18/24 months depending on graphics, if anyone is interested I could write it.
Hi Frank!
Did you get in touch with US GOLD? :)
:) Hi Dan. I think this write up is another in need of an update and one of my early ones. No-one from U.S. Gold contacts knew anything, so I think it would be a complete fluke to find anything of this. Hope that Lance or one of the team finds something in time.
Ok, sorted. My early write ups really are terrible. Gradually i’ll get them all updated :)