Back in the dark ages, say the summer of 1992, I was but a mere student with a long summer break stretching before me. Earlier that year, I'd managed to get myself addicted to a game a friend found when digging out his old MSX. Called Eric and the Floaters or something like that, it had us playing for hours until we found a game on the PC Engine called Bomberman, which was essentailly the same game. And there was much rejoicing.

I decided to have a go a writing a little game based on the idea of Eric/Bomberman. Hacking bits and pieces together - a game arena, a player to run around it, a bomb - it gradually started to turn into a game. Further hacking added some blockages and another player and suddenly it was playable. I added a few enemy robots, nuclear reactors and a few single player levels and decided to call it Moonquake. The story goes along the lines of you're a demolition expert and you've been called to the moon. A meteor has struck near the base causing rockfalls, which you must clear using your bombs.

Once "complete", I sent the game to Archimedes World magazine, who published it on the December 1992 cover disk. And that was that.

A few years later, I decided it was time for an update. This was spring 1996. The code for Moonquake worked, but was a complete mess - there was no way I could make anything starting with that. So I started from scratch, polling newsgroup comp.sys.acorn.games for ideas for the Moonquake sequel, Marsquake. I got a lot of useful feedback from the newsgroup, including interest from Steve Mumford at Acorn User magazine. Over the course of the development of Marsquake, several progress reports were published in the Acorn User games section.

Initially, I thought that Marsquake would take about six months work, but as extra features were added, and work commitments slowed progress on Marsquake, it wasn't until the summer of 1997 that the game was completed. Marsquake was released on the September 1997 cover disk.

Work didn't stop there. Apart from several bug fixes, I wanted to make some changes to the game before releasing it over the internet, once AU's three month ownership of the game was over. I was intending to tidy up the in-built editor active in my development version only, but was surprised to find a rather nice desktop editor already available on the internet. I decided to continue with an editor of my own, but decided it was time to learn to program the wimp!

One crash course in wimp programming later, I created an editor that runs on the desktop and creates episode files of up to sixteen levels, complete with their own graphics set.

Further enhancements to the game include computer controlled players in multiplayer games and a serial link option to allow you to play multiplayer games over two machines - eases keyboard congestion!

This is how I've arrived at Marsquake Boom:Deluxe. It's been a lot of work, so I hope you don't think I'm too greedy distributing this version as Shareware. Enjoy!!