A sad tale for this unfinished RPG game.
This was in development by Waveform in the 90’s, but sadly the game’s creator John Kaiser died in April 23, 1997 due to Hodgekin’s Lymphoma. John left behind this very title which was released into the world by XmikeX. XmikeX was a friend of Waveform and released the remains on August 28, 1997, through disC=overy magazine. It was embedded within the magazine text as a UUEncoded sfx file. Jon Mines recently confirmed that the game was to be published under the Stallion Software label had John finished it.
According to rumours, all of John’s source disks and hardware were given to another C64 scener, which may be Roy Batty.. though there is news of Ernest Stokes having some disks and hardware. This was brought up due to the possibility of someone finishing what is excellent work by John.
It is sad to put a game into GTW for these reasons, but it would be wrong not to, and one thing left to do for John’s title is to immortalise it and preserve what it was.
It is a nice little RPG, and thanks to TRIAD recently cracking the game, they have put the instructions into a note file at the beginning of the demo.The basic controls are : ‘ { and / on the PC keyboard to move the little man around the world.
It seems that the game didn’t reach a large stage of completion, as there is not too much on the disks, but it depends on how big John was planning this game to be. Hopefully friends of John will be able to shed some more light on his title, and we’ll be able to read the doc file which is with the download.
A lot more work needed to fully preserve this game in GTW, but for now this is a masterful piece of work to check out and hopefully John will be pleased that people can enjoy what he managed to create.
Jon Mines suggests that there is a second preview which includes the titles screen, company screen and an intro screen, which we hope to add to the main download very soon!
A friend of John, Staci has very kindly passed on some notes which John wrote on the game to use for its development. The scans you can find below.
A sad tale to a GTW…
Contributions: Loribee, Jon Mines, Staci
I love the graphics to this game. Pity it will never be finished.
Venturia was to be published under the Stallion Software label. There is a second preview that includes title screen, company screen, and an intro screen.
Thanks Jon. Do you know where we could obtain that other preview from? Would be good to add it to the main archive, or is this something which is yet to be released?
Frank – I’ll try to find the other version of the preview and make sure you get a copy.
Moloch, thank you for releasing what you have. John would have appreciated it.