Retronauts - 758: Dark Castle & Hamumu Games

Episode Date: March 30, 2026

Is the castle Dark, or Spooky? In this episode—featuring Dark Castle creator Mark Pierce and Hamumu Games owner and operator Mike Hommel—it is both!Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week in Retronauts, Hamumu and Dark Castle. Well, you try and make a joke out of those two things. Hello, Nauties. Welcome to another fabulous episode of Retronauts, hosted by me, Stuart Jip. Spring has sprung, the birds are in song. A plane just flew over in a really inconvenient way, which meant I had to re-record this intro. But it's fine, because I've got a couple of interviews in this episode.

Well, informal discussions, as I prefer to call them. But I spoke to Mike Hommel from Hammu Games. I'd give you a little intro to Humimu Gaines, but I think that the interview sort of speaks for itself. It's something that I discovered a long time ago, and I've had a consistent interest in. So I'm hoping that with this episode, more people will check out their stuff,

and they'll see the sort of the passion that goes into it. I also spoke to Mark Pierce, the creator of Dark Castle, which is a sort of classic Mac game from back in the day, though I first discovered it on the Mega Drive, which also will be discussed in the episode. and that's a new game out called Return to Dark Castle that includes the original levels from Dark Castle and Beyond Dark Castle

but that's all covered in the episode as well but that is the timing, that is why it's happened and I was excited to speak to him and find out about his history and how that game is made and what's coming next hopefully you will also enjoy listening to it I will return in the middle between the two interviews for a very brief handover and then I will return at the end to do the usual stuff

thanks very much I'm off now, bye So, yeah, if you wouldn't mind just introducing yourself and then we'll crack on, you know, I'll just get into it. Okay. I'm Mike Hummel. I've been doing Hamumu games for 35 years, something like that. Wow. That's what I do. I guess the best place to start, I think, would be just out of personal curiosity.

I think this information may well be out there, but I wasn't able to find it. But where does the name Hamumu come from? Oh, boy. That's, I can tell you that it means whisper in Hawaiian as far as I know, but that has nothing to do with anything because I used to go by the name Hamul, J-A-M-U-L in like high school. Not a lot, but just sometimes, just for fun because it was like an Arabic version of my name Hamil. I was like Hamul. And it was just a stupid thing I did. And so there were people who knew me as Hamul.

And coincidentally, that's also the name of a town right near where I grew up. And I didn't even realize that until years later. But my friend had a kid who was maybe four years old who tried to call me Hamul. And he said, Hamuu. And that just kind of worked as the. dumb version of Hamul. So I went with it because that is the whole theme of

my whole setup. I've got to ask an attached question because the sort of the logo I get for Hammumu games. You've got a sort of round dog. Is that correct? What's up with the round dog?

I guess it turns out that everything I do comes from high school. because my friend's name, last name was Godfrey. And if you spell that backwards, it's Yerf Dog. So I made up a cartoon character named Yerf Dog, who is just an inflatable dog. And again, that was just an example of something that was really dumb. So it made perfect sense as the mascot for my company. So I've stuck with that ever since.

So because I think it should be sort of briefly, explained really. I say the most prominent games that you've got available currently would be the ones that are on Steam. A Kid Mystic just released, the Steam version of that game. Prior to that, it was Luniland, Halloween Hill, Dr. Lunatic, Supreme, with Cheesel or with Steam, Kid Hello, and Robot Once at All. I must confess at this point, I haven't played Robot Once at all yet, but I did buy it this morning. I just didn't play it yet, which was stupid of me. I should have played it in order to do research, but that's just not me. I'm not a research guy.

But you've been making games for a very long time, as you say, 35 years. And your first game was spis popped, is that right? Is that you pronounce it? Well, yes, that is how you pronounce it. That's the first thing I released publicly. Oh, I see. Yeah, it was, I put it out as shareware with the request of $5. But if you couldn't do that, send me a postcard from where you live.

live and I think I got $10 and three postcards. I mean, would you say it was worth the outlay of time there? What were they nice postcards? Were they from nice places? Yeah, it was, I have no recollection of where they were from other than that they were international, so it was fun to get something from somewhere out there. Spice popped smashing pumpkins in the small piles of putrid debris. I've got to untangle because I first encountered that phrase in Doom, obviously, with the, with the clip, no clip, cheat.

So that game is like a sort of a whole game sort of reference to that, or is it to, or is there more to that? Because I'm not sure where that came from in the first place. Well, it's complicated because people think it's based on Doom, but actually the cheat code in Doom is based on the same source as the title of my game. which is a, like a Usenet discussion back in 1993 about the fact that Doom was about to come out. People were saying, I don't remember exactly what the argument was, but that, you know, Doom is such an incredibly short and simple name. And for whatever reason, recognition or whatever, it should be something long and complicated, like smashing pumpkins into small piles of future debris.

and I thought it would be funny to create that very game, Smashing Pumpkins, etc., and release it on the same day as Doom. So I created it and we released it, December 10, 1993, when Doom came out. So indeed, it is the same game as Doom, sort of. It's a little bit different, but it's similar. There are some small differences. Yes.

And that was the game that introduced Boafo the god slayer, the sort of protagonist of that. Who, of course, he returned in, well, several other games. The original Spice Popped, now I haven't played this. I apologize, once again, a critical research failure. But this is available still on your Itch Store. Yes. I believe it's available free. But that was sort of, I'm not sure what I could call it.

Because I don't want to be obvious and say it's Pac-Man. It's similar. It's, you're sort of marching around the maze and, uh, whacking things with your hammer. Well, that's the twist. That is not Spis-Pop. That is amazing Spis-Pop. Oh, my apologies. Okay.

Wow. Yeah, that's a game I released later, which is totally a Pac-Man clone, but you can play two-player competitively. Uh, the original Spis-Bopped is, um, it's kind of similar to Dr. lunatic because dark lunatic was based on it. But it's, you know, top down, you run around and you throw hammers at pumpkins. But everything is very tiny and it has an amazing death sequence when you die. It's very worth checking out.

But it also has the worst music of any game that has ever been made, which is very pleasant. A lot of people have talked about the music. I had, I knew nothing about how music worked. And the code I was using to make it was not very functional. So I basically just came up with strings of like four or five notes that kind of made sense to me. And I didn't know what notes they were. I just did them. They were different pitches of sound.

And I thought that kind of sounds like music. And they were literally about five notes long looping forever. So it was very painful for most people. The wonderful thing is that the editor will probably put that music in. in just like an indecitial and this and everyone will be able to hear it although maybe we should make them download it in order to do so

Now see This is I thought I'm not I'm no expert But I thought I had a sort of basic understanding there But it appears even at the first hurdle I have fallen Copy the wrong original game So was amazing Spispop

Was amazing Spispop the next one or was there more before that or what happened after Spis Pop? Well, let's see. Spisbop was the original that was released in 93. Probably the next actual

product that people could buy oh boy would have been probably it gets convoluted but probably spooky castle which is a sort of an excerpt of Dr. Lunatic. It's just a single Dr. Lunatic world broken

off into its own game. Same thing. You run around with hammers, smashing things, not pumpkins, though. And then Dr. Lunatic is the big version of that, which I had actually made first. But I spun it off into spooky castle and Kid Mystic because e-games was the publisher for these games. I was talking to them about publishing these on their little

collection CDs they put in office stores. And apparently they didn't like the idea of an adult bald man as the character. They felt that that was not something appealing to children. And they said, you know, can it be a dinosaur or something? And that's how I invented Kid Mystic. I was like, all right, I'll just make a version of this where you're a wizard. That'll be fun for kids. So I created Kid Mystic and they released that first.

But then they also did release Spooky Castle as like a smaller game. That's how I found out about your games because in the UK they had Spooky Castle out sort of big bucks on the shelves and I'd purchased from EGames a Speedy Eggbert which is another one of theirs and through that I sort of thought well this is good

so I loved that game because I had a stage creator that was all about that not that it's about me but I'll get this over as quick as I can this boring story and then I saw Spooky Castle and I have to be honest at the time I didn't pick it up but what I did have was Eddie Galaxy from one of the e-games discs. And it wasn't until much later. I don't remember how I discovered Dr. Lunatic,

but it wasn't until much later that I sort of realized I put sort of two and two together. I was like, wait a second. This is the same guy. This is the same people. And suddenly realizing there's a lot of sort of history there. And was the spooky castle that was on the shelves? Was that spooky castle or was that actually kid mystic? renamed Spooky Castle?

Because I'm sure you were playing as a, like, it was very, it just seems like a bit of a web to untangle there. Yes, that, that was like the bane of my existence for several years. And as you can see, it's still a problem today. E-games, in their infinite wisdom, they felt that they wanted to tie together the different games that, you know, were coming from me. They say, oh, well, you know, we want them to, people to know, these are coming from same franchise.

Yeah. So Spooky Castle or like the Adventures of Woffa colon spooky castle is one game. And then when I gave them the game that I said, you know, this is Kid Mystic. That's that's totally, that's the whole thing that I called it just Kid Mystic. They said, let's call it spooky castle colon the adventures of Kid Mystic. And I tried to argue that those aren't those aren't the same. same universe. That's like two opposite things. One

is called spooky castle and it's the Adventures of Kid Mystic. The other is called the Adventures of Bluffa and it's sub-dital spooky castle. That doesn't even make sense and it has caused so much confusion in the entire world. As I've just demonstrated with my

apologies, I mean, there are some horror stories about e-games in general and including like spyware and things on the show as a series. So I do apologize for that experience on behalf of the world, I guess. But they gave me Speedy Eggbert, and they did introduce me to all of this, so I can't completely despise them, unfortunately.

But, yes, Bwaffe. I must, as I pronounced that incorrectly again, I must ask you about Bwaffe, because there is not a very conventional protagonist. No. as you say, bald, which is great. You know, I'm all about that, so I'm here for it. But where did he come from? Does he exist prior to sort of making these games?

I often find a lot of people that had characters in like drawings or comics or things like that. No, he... So, 1993, I was in college. And in one of my classes, there was this guy, and I remember his first name, but I won't say. his last name was Bwaffe. And he became like a character in my mind. He was not bald. He didn't look anything like this.

But just because in class one day, you know, the teacher was going down the list of names, who's here and who isn't. And he got to Bwatha. And instead of replying here, the guy said, Bwafa. And the teacher said, Bwafa.

and the guy said, Bwafa, and they went back and forth five or six times. And they appeared to both be saying the exact same thing, but apparently it was not to this guy's liking. And that's the whole story of who this person is and everything I know about him. But it caught in my mind, so I wanted to name the character after that experience. That's the whole thing. And the original Swiss pop, now, again, because I've made this, terrible mistake already. Amazing Spespop I know and has the hammers, the pans of power, the candles, etc.

And these are all sort of recurring Bwaffe sort of motifs. It was the original Spispop, because the original Spespop was with the candles, but was that also with the hammers or was that something that came later? Yeah. Everything, it was smashing pumpkins with big red hammers. Bluffa theoretically looked the same, but he was like about eight pixels tall. So you can't really tell, but the concept was there. And in that game, you collected candles because, of course, you were killing jack-o-lanterns,

so you got candles out of them. And then that became brains in Dr. Lunatic with the candles as a, like, a bonus secret item to find. Yes. And going back a bit, sort of, can I ask how you got into sort of games yourself, what you were playing? I mean, when was this? if you don't mind me asking, what sort of age where you went, Spice Pop was published? I was probably 20 or 21.

Right. And that was, all I've done my entire life has been video games. That's been my only real interest. And before I had any ability to do any of them, I was drawing out levels on paper and, you know, drawing up characters and all that stuff. So that's been my goal in life forever. And then I went to college for a computer science degree,

and I was studying these things. So I created that. But it was far from the first game that I had made. It's just the first one that was visible to the public. So, yeah, it's been. What sort of the stuff you were making prior to that, what sort of tech were you using on, How did you discover this at all?

I'm just curious where this all sort of comes from. Well, like sort of which games were inspiring you and that you were playing. Back then, well, I know that, like, my big game before Spis Pop was something I made in high school called Mucho Combat. And you can probably guess the inspiration for that. We went to the arcade most days after school where there was, you know, this was the time when Street Fighter and Mortal combat were around and first come out. And so I was obsessed with that and made my own version of Mortal Kombat, again, with characters about eight pixels high.

In that case, it was because the code I was writing in Turbo Pascal was so inefficient that I could only make it move full speed if it was maybe a quarter of the screen big. So I was making this Mortal Kombat game where the gameplay was in a little section of the screen and the rest was just a backward. ground blocked out. So that's all I could do. It's just make a tiny version of things. And, you know, that was that was inspiration.

But, you know, at home I would play. I had my Nintendo and an Apple 2 for a while, Apple 2GS for a while, eventually, you know, 386 or whatever. And I was just playing whatever was around in those days. Wizard's Crown is when I. I always remember, I don't know, whatever it was popular on the Apple in early 386, I was playing. Yeah, Karatica. Do I remember that?

Yeah, sort of looking at Wizard's Crown and looking at the original Spispoch, I do think there's a sort of aesthetic similarity. Yes. Which is cool, I mean, although sort of an apple, I'm not sure. I mean, where did you program Spispot? Was that for, that was for PC, obviously, but. Yeah, that was on. Yeah. Okay.

And when that became Amazing Space Pop, that was, continued in the Adventures of Bwaffe and then Dr. Lunatic. And Dr. Lunatic seems to me like a game that's got quite a long sort of a tale because I remember seeing that for the first time

in sort of a complete form, as I assumed, quite a long time ago. And then when it turned up on Steam, that was just excellent. You know, the enormous, number of stages in Dr. Lunatic.

Is that a sort of community compilation there? Yeah. I made a fair number of levels to begin with, and that was originally released,

what's a game called Spispop 2 colon, Dr. Lunatic, that had, you know, five or six worlds in it that were my creation. And then with the level letter,

are built in. And so on my website, I would collect people's levels, share them with everyone, and eventually got their permission to release them all together. And that was Dr. Lunatic Supreme with cheese, which is, you know, 300 worlds. So thousands of levels. But the quality varies because, of course, it's made by all kinds of people. But the good news is that variance also goes up from what I was doing as well as down. So there's some real winners.

there too. And sort of what grabbed me about to talk to Lunatic when I played it is it had a sort of I'm trying to think of the best way to describe this. It feels like the exact opposite of kind of, gosh, it's very, I guess singular is the wrong word

if it is this kind of community thing, but it's got this obvious kind of shared inspiration of like it seemed like a game where something would be put in the game because it would be cool because you wanted it to see it. rather than, like, we need to do this for this audience, for this audience. Because what it reminds me of quite a bit is, I don't know if it's pronounced Zist or ZZT.

I've always called it ZZT, which had a similarly kind of, I don't like saying homemade, but that is kind of the best I can do. It's kind of cozy because, you know, it's someone's creation rather than a kind of something that's been pieced together because it would be popular that way, if that makes sense. Right. It's got a very unique vibe, which I enjoy. I mean, I was dipping into it this morning, just as a sort of refresher. And it was a world that was, I think it's called something like Halloween horror or something.

Yeah. And the fact that I can just sort of dip into a few levels there and all of them had sort of different challenges. They all had hidden things in them. I didn't feel like any point like this is dipping in quality or this is dipping in inspiration. Because there's just so much going on, even to the point of as well as having your difficult stages or you're staged with sort of stealth like elements with the red mummies for example that you are sort of avoiding.

You've also got stages where you can just collect like 16 pants of power 15 hammers and go absolutely crazy. Yes. So it's it is very difficult to explain but I love it. I love that game and I've not

I've not come close to finishing 100%ing it because that's a tall order. Maybe when I'm about 70 I'll be done with it. But until then I guess how did Bofa sort of evolve into sort of Dr. Lunatic? And so what was the time frame there? You know, how long did it take to come to that game? Boy.

Well, the release, you know, Spispop was 1993, and then Dr. Lunatic was probably finished the original one in maybe 98 before, you know, and no one was seeing it then, but it was pretty, done. And so that was, it was five years, but I certainly wasn't working on it for five years. That's one of my big issues as an old man now is that back when I was young, I have no idea how I did what I did. I was creating entire games in a week. And I don't know how that happened. I'm completely at a loss at this point. It takes me years to get anything done. But apparently I had energy. So yeah, that was

probably a year or two years of work. And, you know, it has hundreds of enemies. Each one 3D modeled and animated and rendered from eight directions. And it is like you said, where I just thought, the one I always think of is the mailboxer, which is a mailbox with boxing gloves that punches you. And literally it was just a pun I came up with. thought I better make that in the game and I did. Everything about it is just kitchen sink thrown in there.

Yeah, it's what I make the comparison with ZGT with its sort of community of stages is when you play one, you get the impression. It's very sort of authored. It's definitely made by someone. It's not sort of homogenous, which I really like. The fact that you're getting sort of messages in the game for certain events and triggers and things, it feels like you're sort of being spoken. to it feels like you're sort of being played around with and it's playful and it's it's fun and i i like

that a lot um then so structurally that game is um as well as having the clearing out of the sort of the hub stages is i haven't actually explained what it what you're actually doing that game um i think it'd probably be better than me at doing that just for people who haven't played dr lunatic what's the uh what's what is dr lunatic what kind of game is that that's i can never answer what kind of game it is that's such a mystery to me but it is top-down action and you run around in a hub world. There are, you know, who knows how many, because people can make these levels, but something like 12 or 15 levels. And you run in from the hub, you run into each of the levels. You complete the level by collecting all the brains in the

level, which that's always the one required goal. But there's also hidden key chains, which can unlock a secret level. And then they're also just playing secret levels, which you've just an entrance inside another level. And you make your way around getting the brains from every level. And then a boss will open up. Or not necessarily a boss, but whatever, a final level. And you go into there, you fight that. And you earn yourself a key of lunacy, which may have no purpose, but for the first

hundred of them in Supreme with Cheese, the first hundred of them you can spend in the shopping mall to open. a locker, which can give you all sorts of things. That, again, Mortal Kombat inspired. That came straight from the Mortal Kombat crypt. The idea that you can open all these things, you don't know what's in them, but you're going to get something. So that is part of the fun. I did love the crypt, and it was nice to see as a representation of that.

I mean, when you're in the mall and Supreme with Cheese, like, the scope of it, to me, seems enormous. There's a realization of just how much stuff there isn't in the game. to find. I wouldn't say it was overwhelming because, again, you can play a stage, you can duck out, you can come back and do another stage, or you can just sit down and session the thing. But, yeah, just sort of add to that, as well as sort of top-down action, you know, there are some sort of positive elements.

I mean, I did one today that had some sort of Socorban-based sort of block pushing, which was nice. It wasn't too taxing, but it was nice that it was there. Secrets, as you mentioned, like lots of different weapons, like missiles and flamethrs and flamethrowers and machine guns and spears and all kinds of stuff which is great fun and um and that ships uh with the editor as well right so if you finish all the 1500 stages still how many is you can now crack on making your own which again did make me think about zZT once again for the community sort of aspect um it reminds me sit a little bit of uh chips challenge these sort of more reflex-based stages of that but uh

Yeah, it seems such a big project. And so how did the sort of community come together for that game? Because it seems, would it be fair to say that's the most popular one that you've made? Yeah, I think so. Well, possibly. The Robot Want series got really big on Flash. So there was kind of that direction. But, oh, ignoring all this, Grotopia is by orders of magnitude, the biggest thing I've ever done.

But that's a whole separate issue. So my own stuff, my website stuff, yes, Dr. Lunatic is probably the one that everything is centered around. And, you know, the community was back then in 2000, everybody, every game company had their own website. And if you were interested in their games, that's where you went. And, you know, I created a forum there. And it really built up. never lots of people like everyone else had, but really,

really dedicated fans that still are in my Discord today, that in fact, it's not technically my Discord. One of my fans runs it. So they remain these people who have been playing the games for over 20 years, who are now professionals in various fields and were children when it started. And it's very strange, actually. but, you know, we've got these connections.

One of the kids from back in the day, who is known as Space Maniac, is actually a significant part of releasing these games today. He's done the updating of all these old games to make them available in this tool he has called Ham Sandwich, which is, lets them work on the web from, you know, on Linux and on PC. And, you know, it kind of does the downloading and keeps them managed. And he did the porting to steam for these games and then, you know,

gave me the opportunity to get in there and add the little extra things too. So he's been a huge part of it. So you mentioned Grotopia. Would it be okay to ask you about that one? I knew about it, but it wasn't on your websites. I wasn't sure if it was a contentious game for you at all. Well, it's not contentious per se. it's, well, it's, it's hard to even discuss because it is the, it is the life-changing moment.

I was, I was broke and I was on the end of my rope because all these other games have not made me much money. You know, it's been a very indie lifestyle. Yeah. And eventually that dragged me down to almost being there, almost having to. go find a real job. And then my friend Seth, who I knew from making various games, so I hadn't met in person by that point, but I have since. He said, you know, hey, do you want to collaborate on this little idea that I have?

And that was Grotopia. And I figured I'd just give it one last shot because I had a couple months left before I would have to go looking for jobs. And within those couple of months, it was. was already, you know, 10, 100 times what I had been previously making. And it only went way, way, way up from there. So, you know, it was an absolute life-changing experience. It was amazing.

But it was also 24-7 on-call answering emails, just grinding me down, completely burning me out over the next four years. And this was like a sort of a side, well, we're on-sidescrant. But it's like a massively multiplayer sort of business. This isn't when I've played personally. I did some reading about it. And what I gathered is that it's an MMO that sort of gradually sort of picked up more and more users, but it was basically being administrated by two people.

I laugh like I'm making fun. I'm not making fun. I'm laughing at the sort of escalation of it because it sounds like it would be extremely stressful. It definitely was. It was a major burnout. But it was just the two of us for several years. And then we hired some people and got our wives to help just answering emails and moderating in game. Because, you know, there was, we had tens of millions of players.

And they were all being bad. So we had to manage them all. And, yeah, it's an MMO on mobile. It's available today. it's a Ubisoft game now. And I am no longer involved on any level. We just sold it and got out of there so that I could

stop having that stress in my life. Yeah. Congratulations on that. Yeah, it was great to get out. I looked at Seth has several sort of blogs about the game, and something that I just found quite charming was if this game had

sort of established its own sort of economy, and there were people who were sort of exploiting this economy and what would happen is you would invisibly sort of trail them or track what the sort of the sort of naughty things they were doing and then follow them back to whoever was the source of it and then they would be banned but I did enjoy the fact that when muting a character this is just a touch that I find really charming it would instead of just fully muting them it would put a bandaid or a dandage over their mouth and they would only be able to speak in mumbles yes that's great that was great that was

duct tape. Yeah, that's it. Duck tape. Yeah, that's excellent. I really, I really have to applaud you on that one. It's the sort of those sort of touches that I think carry forward into a lot of your, well, all of your games that I've played, I think there's a great deal of appeal in them. I just feel very, this is funny, this will be funny, put the same, put the same. Yeah, it's a lot of that. Which is great. Yeah. A lot of that is in Grotopia, once Seth's doing, he's, he's very similar in those regards, but much more successful than me. he, you know, would have these ideas.

We could ductate them, but also if we needed to, you know, have them stop bothering people, instead of banning them from the game, he had them get sent to hell, which was a world in the game where there's nothing interesting to do. You can just smash blocks all day and you can't talk anymore and you're just there in hell. And he just enjoyed the fact that he was sending people to hell when they were bad. So the robot one series you said was also successful. How did that get started, the Flash games?

Well, like most things I do, none of which we mentioned, it began as a, I'm going to say, let them dare game. Ludum Dari is the official term, but everybody calls it Let them dare. I know I do. Now I know better. Well, I mean, it's Latin, and I think. the correct pronunciation is Ludumdare, but, you know, no one does that. So I've been participating those since literally the first one when it was 24 hours, but it became 48 hours. Oh, and I say

I've been participating. I haven't participated in probably 15 years, but before that, I was always in it. And, you know, you make a game in 24 or 48 hours, and Robot wants was one of those games and I polished it up over the next month or so and put it on a flash site to see how it would do and it was very popular and it ended up becoming a four-part series online. And that's sort of a Metroidvania sort of platforming kind of experience, is that? Yeah, that was the premise was, I don't remember what the prompt. Oh, I think the prompt was just exploration, but I decided to make a mini Metroidvania. So, like, it's a Metroidvania game, but only over the course of that initial release was like maybe 20 minutes long.

So you go through the whole process of initially you can't even jump all the way to the, you know, full double jump and rapid fire and everything that you have at the end of a Metroidvania within about 20 minutes. Right. To be clear, it was robot once kitty was the first one. So it was to go get the kitty. And so where were those games published? Were they on the sites like Congregate and things like that? Yeah. Congregate was the first site and then, you know, everything else that, all the other places you can put games like that, but definitely it started at Congregate.

So I have to ask, and I apologize if this is a rude question, but with Flash games on sites like Congregate, I mean, how do they, like, how are they measured sort of in success, like, how do they make, how do they earn my I genuinely don't know. It's been published by Publish it, so I genuinely don't know. It's, there was, I mean, it's gone now, of course. Flash is dead, but it

was just a simple system where they would keep track of how many plays you get and they give you X amount of pennies for however many plays because they've got ads on the side of the games. And so they would just send me a check every month. And it was not a large check, but it added up.

you know, a few hundred bucks each month maybe, a tapering down over time. So, you know, I kept turning those out every month or two. And to me, that was a living. That was an improvement over what I was doing. And that was the first game that you published on Steam, the compilation of all of those. Yeah.

And adding the sort of, I'm not sure if it was in the original releases, but you had the remix mode as well. Yeah, we added easy maps and remix maps to the initial normal maps that were on there. And then I also added a new game, robot wants justice to round it out. Yeah, and because that's a platform where it's sort of segling awkwardly

into sort of kid hello, because this is one that I bought, not knowing again, it was, I remember when I bought it, but I was like, hey, it's Dr. Lunatic, it's Dr. Lunatic. This is going to be great, and it was. And that seems,

did the experience of, That was originally a costume party, right? Yeah. And that was, so that's sort of the same sort of time as robot wants kiddie or maybe the year after. You know, I don't know what year that was, but somewhere in there. That one was not a flash game. It was on my website, and it used, you know, a database.

You could submit your levels. And it was all built around people submitting levels. And unfortunately, that entire data. base was lost, so I wasn't able to include those levels in the Steam release because there were two or three thousand levels for that game, and they were ranged from easy to absolutely impossible. Like, it's amazing what people were able to come up with in that game that was very hard to begin with. Yeah, it reminds me of Crystal Caves, the Apogy game, very much, actually. Though, I think it was the first time I actually interacted with

was on the Steam forums as me saying, where's the secret in this level? I can't find it anywhere. Because they're very well hidden. Some of those secrets. I think there's one in every stage, right? There's something hidden in every stage or every world. Yeah, in the, what's it called?

In the Candy Quest, yes, every level has a hidden apple. Yeah, that was it. The Apple, so it's been a while since I played this one. See, I'm excited because I get to play robot once at all after this. I get to come in and then realize, oh, I should have asked you this question. Damn. Yeah, you're going to ask me where the secrets are in that for sure. I probably will.

Yeah, I'll just call you whenever I feel like 24-7 to get the line back for that. But yeah, so you're currently working on. What are you currently working on? It's broken build simulator, is that right? Or will I say that? I don't know if you are currently currently working on that. Well, at the moment, I am podcasting, but I was working on that two days ago. I it's in a it's in a weird place where I'm having a really hard time so I actually am secretly

alternating days I guess sort of I'm also kind of not working half the time because I'm having troubles but alternating with secret project um you know I've been very inspired by uh doing this kid mystic re-release it was extremely fun to go back to this old very simple code and just expanding on it and, you know, adding new spells and things was so fun and so easy. And so I'm kind of trying to dive into that because Broken Build Simulator has been very complicated. Yeah, it's, yeah, it's a, it's a roguelike game. Broken Build Simulator is a term people use some, some people,

for these types of, you know, rogue like games where you try to build up your character in such a way that you have effectively broken the game. Not to simplify it, but games like VanPyar Survivors and Brotato and yeah. Yeah, it's got it's comprised of eight parodies.

They're not really parodies, but theoretically they're parodies of these games. So one of them is called Cro-Nado, as in a tornado of Crows, which is a parody of Brotato. But not really, because it's the gameplay is more centered around the fact

that it's a tornado of crows than around anything in Brotado. But whatever. I'm just having fun with it. Yeah. And I mean, there's no projection of sort of a release for that. That's just when it's done. Yeah, it's always when it's done. I'm trying.

I feel like I'm a good, maybe 85% done, but it has hit like a crisis of faith at this point where it's, Yeah. It's got this element that the plot of the game, which, you know, these games don't really have plots. But the plot is that I was creating this game and I got trapped inside it. And so it's me you're trying to rescue. And so it's very meta on a thousand different levels. But one thing in it is that there are 200 plus like little. conversations

monologues, I guess, from me that you earn as you do like many achievement type things. And I've only recorded about three of them and I've written you know, 30 or 40. Yeah.

But that is where I got very stuck in just to like the gameplay is all there but this idea of what what is going to be something people actually want to hear instead of turn off immediately is posing a real challenge for me. So you are in a sense, in even more meta sense, you sort of are trapped in the game.

Oh, absolutely. Yes. Wow. That's a lot to unpack. I hope that that's, I hope that gets resolved in as painless a manner as possible. Yeah. That's not because I selfishly want to play this game. That is about 70% of it. 30% is genuine concern. Yeah, it's concerned. But I'm hoping that will happen. That will come together, and I hope that that gets resolved. I will ask, because I won't keep you much longer,

but I do want to ask, of course, about Kid Mystic, because the Enchanted Edition, which just released quite recently, that's had quite a few additions to the game, quite significant additions to the game, because you mentioned you've had fun going back and adding new spells and such, So could you tell us what's new in that version and what's going on with that? Yeah, it, I mean, I guess I was wrong to say new spells, but new effects for the spells. There's a skill tree, which is the big thing.

And so that has a whole bunch of different ways. Skill trees are my obsession. So I love, you know, upgrades that aren't just numbered increases, things that change how the game plays. and make you go in a different direction, that kind of thing. That to me is very much the thing I think about all the time and really obsess over. So in this game,

that's sort of what I've done is kind of built sets of... There's three different skills for each spell because the game has 19 spells, although they're in pairs. So theoretically, there's only nine spells that you have to worry about here. So the nine spells each have three skills, which you can invest into, you know, tweak how they work.

And you can really do some interesting, different kind of builds with that. And then on top of that, there's the room system, which is kind of like, it's kind of the effects of legendary gear in Diablo, except that you just, once you found the room, you can just equip and unequip. So they're, you know,

those are the more game changery effect. where, you know, like one of them will make the comets that the Armageddon spell drop instead of doing damage, they freeze enemies. So, you know, you might build around that. So the skills in the runes are the big thing for me, because to me, a game is sort of a, I don't really care about the story or about going through the levels. I care about how it plays.

And so for me, having that basically means you've got 10 games, because you play the game 10 times over in different builds, and that's just going to always be fun. So I love that. And on top of that, we've added new, it's hard to say, but all the levels have been expanded because all this new stuff means there's new secrets to find. So every level has like a couple new puzzles hidden in it

and weird little interactions to get these new secrets. And then there are also four new levels to get even more of the new secrets. And those have some really crazy new gameplay. Like there's a cooking simulator and this ghost busting thing, which is really very strange, but a ghost busting gameplay. And just all that stuff. So it's been a lot of stuff that might not seem like new content to other people. like there's not there's only four new levels

but to me this is what I want in an update to a game as more ways to play to make it feel different rather than actually more zones to travel through and that's the version that's on Steam you can still that the original version or the enhanced version from 2004 or so I believe that's still available on the Edge Store

but the Steam version is the one with the ruins with the new secrets and yeah and all my Steam releases, there is still the free Itchio version, which those are all open source, too. You can make your own versions if you want. And what I'll ask, because I meant to ask this earlier, but I forgot. So it's going to sound like a bit of an unsequitant now, actually. But the graphics, the 3D model sort of graphics, do you make those or do you work with someone

else on those? Or do you literally do all of those yourself? Yeah. part of the thing I've struggled with all throughout my career has been that I want to be, I think of myself as a mom-and-pop shop for video games. So the idea that you would go and get, you know, an Etsy game from me. It's my handcrafted stuff. So in the past, I have done literally everything on these games.

And in more recent times, I've farmed out the next. music and then in some cases even more like a robot wants it all I hired a programmer who did a lot of the programming on that yeah so things like that but prior to that you know kind of at the heart of it all has been everything is me even including in Looneyland I actually wrote the music which is not something I'm capable of doing so that was a special treat for me and I've always wanted to be good at music but I just have not put in the research to do it but I can't wrap my head around how music works. But, yeah.

So the 3D models are me. Yeah, so that's what it feeds into that whole sense of like, yeah, this is someone's game. You know, this is an author, this has a voice. This is very, and that's something that really appeals to me. So, I mean, I had assumed the answer was yes, because it seemed so in keeping with everything else. You know, everything just fits together that way, I think. Even when it's unusual or something that's very out there in the game, because it's also consistent in its sort of voice and its aesthetic, I think it works very well.

The one thing I'm going to ask out of, but then I'll let you go, I promise, out of pure selfish desire is I must ask about I'm cool cat bad. Ah, yeah. Because that's in a very unusual sentence. And this is the sentence that is uttered in, for example, Dr. Lunatic, when you have collected the last brain that you need to exit the level, the character says, yeah. And yes, the character then says, I'm not going to try and imitate. He's like, I don't insult you by doing it wrong. But then he says, I'm cool cat bad. And I'd never heard that phrase before.

To the point that when I played the game, I wasn't quite sure what he was saying. Yeah, that's a common problem. So I had to look it up. And now I'm wondering where this phrase comes from. Is this another sort of college thing? As a matter of fact, it is. It's part of my personality being in the games is this is a completely tiny in joke between about five people from college where I went to college there was a restaurant called the Cool Cat Cafe and we went there and we laughed about the fact that it was called the Cool Cat Cafe and we sat down and we were like, Yeah, I'm cool cat bad.

Just because for some reason, it sounded so dumb that this cafe was trying to think it was cool by calling itself the cool cat cafe. So that's the extent of the depth to that. But through the years, people have really, like so many people have not understood what was being said there. Obviously, it was very low quality sound effect. And it's been a whole thing. And people say it all the time now. In fact, when I released Kid Mystic, I sent out keys to tons of streamers.

And one of my favorite things that I've noticed is basically every streamer who plays the game immediately repeats everything the character says. Sometimes every time the character says it, other times it's just once or twice. But I mean, people just watching every streamer say, fire up. fire up. I'm cool cat pad. It's a special treat. And that, just watching that has gotten me back into the thought of these mouth noise sound effects. Because for the last 20 years, 15 years, I've just been doing computer generated sound effects, you know, like 8-bit sounds. And I want to get back to the wacky noises because it really fights in. When I was on Dr. Lunatic today, it was just realizing again, these sound effects are like someone going, well, you presumably going,

I love that. It's just wonderful. It will feed into this aesthetic that I mentioned. But, yes, I don't want to keep you. So what I will say is to listeners, if you haven't played these games, I urge you to do so. I urge you to buy the Steam versions, but also if you want to try them out, they are on. is it's it's dot eo for io forward slash hamumu is that right yeah that's right yeah and you can find them there and give them a go but you really you should buy them don't don't come on don't be cheap

both games they're good games okay and it's interesting to me to have encountered these games so long ago and i'll speak to you so thank you very very much for coming on for your time and i'd like to apologize on the air for getting the time wrong once again because of british time. Thank you, whoever invented British summertime. I despise you. Whoever came up with that, you're my enemy. But yes, looking forward to Broken Build and Secret Project. I guess you can't tell us anything at all about Secret Project. Even some esoteric single word, maybe, it will only make sense when it comes out. Well, my big, you know, I'm always secretive about my releases, but my big concern is that so many times things have fallen apart and I don't release them and I don't

like to, you know, disappoint. Understandable. Understandable. That is understandable. It involves a lot of learning for me. It's a very new tech, so I'm not sure I can make it happen. Understandable, but I hope that you will. I hope that you will.

I hope that if not, then whatever you work on, I will be there for. And hopefully the listeners of Rotronauts will be there also, because if they don't, I'm going to be crossed with them. And it's not going to be pleasant for anyone. But yes, thanks again. And do take care. take care and yes I'm very bad at ending a podcast

this is the best I can do it's hot and I'm bad at it take care of yourself, thank you all right, bye and welcome to the middle of the podcast that was a Monty Python reference I'm British, I've got to do the Monty Python references you know how it is

hopefully you enjoyed that and next up Dark Castle I don't need to give it a preamble because it's all there in fact I'm starting to wonder what's the purpose of these middle sections other than just a reminder of what you're listening to although you knew that already. So I can use this space to do anything I like.

So I'm just going to say, gosh, I don't know. I want to do an episode about V-Tubers, you know? I think I'm going to find an excuse to do that. I'm not going to keep you too long, though. I just want to put that picture in your mind and imagine the sort of carnage that could ensue. We'll just crack straight on with Dark Castle,

and I'll just say up front, cool game. You should give that a go. A different game, difficult game, but a cool game. Let's just get on with it. Let's just crack on. Okay, I am speaking to Mark Piss, creator of Dark Castle, a game I just introed. And hello, it's really, really good to have you on. Hi, well, thank you for having me.

Really appreciate it. I'm going to give a very brief personal history of my, experience of Dark Castle and I must stress up front this is extraordinarily personal and has no bearing on anyone else's reception it's a game I first discovered by an old UK

gaming magazine I think Sega Power reviewing the Mega Drive port of the game. Oh horrible version it has to be said they were not complimentary of that but you know that is the sort of thing that for me I would see that and I would say I want to know myself what that is like so

many years later I did play it and I found it extraordinarily interesting you know it's because we're not going to talk much about the Mega Drive version specifically obviously but it's it's not nothing else on that system at all so it stuck in my mind immediately

and I'm pretty sure I had to use rewind to finish it but I finished it I did so then I wanted to check out the original which of course is on Macintosh and we'll get to that in a moment but I guess the first thing I want to ask is like how did you first sort of discover video games. What was your earliest experience with them? Well, I was going to art school in Chicago at the Chicago School of the Art Institute in Chicago.

And I had started going out when I was 13 actually drawing and painting and stuff like that, but eventually found the film studio or filmmaking classes, which was right next to the sound department, which had a big emu synthesizer with patch base and everything. And they got really into that. And then shortly thereafter, however, they got a computer Bally Basic, which was on the Astrocade machine. And started doing stuff in Bally Basic. And then Tom Defonte, who ran a company called Real Time Design, which designed the chipset, which was at the heart of the Bally Astrocade, but also games like Wizard of War and Gorph use those same chipsets.

And we got a Z-G-R-A-S-S-Z-G-R-A-S-Z-G-G-R-A-S-Z-G-G-S-Z-G-G-R-S-Z-G-G-Rass-S-S-Z-G-G-Rass. machine and I went to town animating on that and uh this what late 70s early 8 you know 79 or so or something like that and I was already playing arcadian I saw my first pong machine when I was in high school um it was across the street at this tennis club and I would ditch class and go play it uh this was you know back in the mid 70s and then in the late 70s when I was in art school I just started playing games again you know it was obviously uh things like space invaders were popular then um I'm not sure when defender came up but you certainly I remember playing space invaders.

And then I started doing animations on the Zeggrass machine, and I got recognized, and the Sigraph conference used, I made this Albert Einstein talking puppet. And that kind of got me involved in making money doing art on the computers. And right after that, I got noticed by real-time design, Tom Defani's group, and started doing demos for them, video demos on the Zeggrass machine, showing how easy it was to animate.

And then who were adjacent in the same building, Rick Frankel had was doing a game with Dave Nutting Associates who had a subcontract with Bally. And I worked in a game called Professor Pac-Man, which again was on that same chip set. And so that was my introduction. And then after Professor Pac-Man, which was an arcade game that came out in 83, I think, and did not meet with great success. Also, 83 was not the best of years for the arcade business. started doing some ports and stuff. Did a Klico Vision game, Richard Scarry's Electronic Word Book, and started doing other small projects at Winter Games on Epics,

which is on the Macintosh. But then a couple gentlemen, myself, Mark Kanner, who was an audio guy at Dave Nutting, and Jay Fenton, who was an engineer who did GORF, the game GORF, formed a company called Macromind. And we formed it with the intent to bring the kind of tools we had at Dave Nutting Associates to the consumers. And it's the same time in the early 80s that the Macintosh was coming on in 84.

And I just started animating. We designed video works, which later became director and got bought by Adobe. And that got me animating and recognized. And then I left a Macromind after a couple of years. And then Charlie Jackson from Silicon Beach Software contacted me and flew me out to talk about doing a game. And that game was Dark Castle. And I went there in one day and pitched the game to them. They said they wanted to do a horror game.

And I said, no, no, no. And I had been playing Dragonslayer a lot. So I said, let's do medieval. Medieval's always good. Right. And so I got up in front of them. And one of the more creative moments of my life, I kind of on a flip chart, penciled in on the, like, I don't know, a handful of levels.

Say, here's how we're going to do it. And they were all kind of in shock. And so was I. And I went back home. made a contract and I worked on Dark Castle with Jonathan Gay, who was the engineer, and Eric Zock, who came up with real sound, which is that, you know, the sound samples, which have been, a lot of people really remember the game because of the crazy sounds in it. And, you know, he did that. It was really interesting because I was living in Chicago and Jonathan Gay was in San Diego,

and I would sit and animate stuff in VideoWorks and send him the VideoWorks files along with a Mac Paint files and he would turn that around and program the assembler and then send me back a floppy disc by a mail and I would look at it then and we went through the whole development like that however during development this small company called FedEx started and so we could actually get stuff overnight yeah incredible how long was the development for dark castle like I have to go look but you know it was it was under nine months six to nine months somewhere in there went pretty quick was there was that much experience like working with the Macintosh?

Or was that something that was basically done from scratch as well? Well, you know, we did video works. And, you know, I was familiar with the Mac from video works and music works. However, you know, the Mac only came out in 84. And, you know, we released Dark Castle in 86 on the Macintosh and then beyond Dark Castle in 87. So, you know, the Mac was still new. And I think that's one of the ways that, you know, we got noticed because we were, you know, one of the first titles on Macintosh. and also quite an interesting game, I guess.

And we ended up dominating the charts for like three to five years in the Mac world charts. So what were your sort of inspirations for the Dark Castle for its gameplay for its theme? Well, you know, you can see, obviously there's some Donkey Kong levels with the barrel rolls and things like that. I was going to ask about the diving bird formations reminding me also of Gallagher and Shield 2. Gallagher also is, you know, I had during that time was, you know, I go out at nights to the bar. We had a bar there called Neo, which was a, I don't know what, a new wave bar. And they had a Galaga machine there and a Donkey Kong machine right next to each other.

And I'd spend almost every night there with Rick, who I was working with on that Professor Pac-Man game. And so those are just big inspirations, you know, but also games like Burger Time. Yeah. You know, all the little games where you have characters in them, you know, even Berserk. You know, it's all the games that were current at that time. I was just, I've always been a more casual game guy. I played arcade games nonstop. I got totally addicted to Tetris.

I'm sorry, Tempest. I got addicted to Tetris like everybody else eventually, but Tempest. And so all those games kind of fed into, you know, what Dark Castle became. So, you know, it's a basic gameplay, arcade gameplay. And that's why the game is so hard also. I mean, you know, the rule of thumb with arcade is, at least back in the day when I was doing it, as, you know, you have to get them to coin up again in 90 seconds, right? You let them play for 90 seconds and you get them to coin up again.

So you had to kill them off. And so Dark Castle is very, very, you know, brutal game. You know, it's kind of like a rogue light or something almost. I'd say, I mean, it's definitely very difficult. I would say, though, with the original version, and with the new version, which we'll talk about, of course, the controls are quite methodical. It must be one of the first, if not the first to use WASD and mouse, which is very sort of common for a different genre, you know, the first-person shooter, but not so much in a sort of, I was going to say side-scroller, but it's flick screen, so that would be

inaccurate platform game or adventure game. But I think we should talk a little bit about the game, how it plays, just in case any listeners aren't familiar with Dark Castle. I guess I'm trying to think the best way I would describe it. It's a reasonably open platform adventure game with puzzles and the word is just completely escaped. Yeah, you know, it's more, I view it as we call it a precision platformer. Yes.

In other words, you know, most platform games, Donkey, not Donkey, Mario and such, you know, it's very bouncy. You can climb up walls. You're bouncing around very fast. You play Yoshi's Island, the same kind of thing. But Dark Castle is very precise. You have to get right up to the edge and make the precise jump to the right distance or you have to time it, a lot of precise timing. And you get to each room in the original Dark Castle, the screens are all just one screen size. And, you know, it didn't scroll or anything.

and you enter the room either at the bottom or the top, and you had to make your way out to the opposite side. And typically there were a bunch of hazards along the way, and it was kind of a puzzle. You had to figure out, typically, I don't know, half a dozen things in the room you had to figure out timing-wise. You know, you had to avoid this thing falling down. You had to catch the rope.

You had to shoot the bats. You had to shoot the rats. And it was very precise. And it was all heavily controlled. You know, the controls were very precise also in terms of, how he walked and ran and jumped, and he had long jumps and short jumps that were always the exact distance. And so once you learned how to navigate with it, it was pretty easy, and it was just a question of solving puzzles. And obviously, because of the success, it obviously had the

right balance of that difficulty and reward. And so we played through a number. There was 30 levels, there's like 15 levels, I think, on Dark Castle and about the same on Beyond Dark Castle. However, beyond Dark Castle, we did enter scrolling in. which was still fairly new back then. I'm very fond of the sort of sense of humor in Dark Castle. Sort of a semi kind of a Monty Python sort of silliness sometimes, which I do enjoy. I think my favorite touch is, rudely, I forgot the exact name of the stage, but it's the one where you get the morning star defeat the executioner.

And then you have to, there are two sets. I'm going to spoil it. Apologues to the listeners. But there are two sets of keys hanging on the wall. And the way that the prisoners react to you approaching the key, is very funny to me. I really did enjoy that because it got me the first time. I was like, well, that's interesting.

Or I either didn't notice that was happening. And I thought it was a very interesting kind of environmental cue without directly telling the player what to do. Just characterful, basically. Yeah, I'm working on a new version now, DC4, which hopefully will be out in 27, and rediscovering the character. And, you know, he's a hapless guy. He's not a superhero. He's not a big, mussely guy. He's kind of been thrust into this task of going to the castle and beating the black night.

And he's constantly getting hurt. You know, he's getting knocked out. He falls down. He gets dizzy. You know, he gets hit with a whip. He gets impaled on a swinging pendulum. You know, he mentioned those guys were called the hangups, those three guys. And they would kind of indicate you, which key you should pick.

And, you know, whether it's Monty Python or, you know, I look to Buster Keaton a lot in terms of the fondiness. You know, at the time, Pitfall Harry had come out. And so that was kind of an influential thing with swinging ropes. And, you know, you always just, I figured if you can make him die and make people laugh at how he dies, you know, and that was further reinforced with the voice, the great audio we had, which, you know, of all the games I've done, and I've done a bunch with Atari and such, people remember all those sounds, very, very iconic sounds, you know, and all the kind of three stooge's sounds that we had. It's a very comical character.

It's interesting you mentioned that if you can kill the player and have them laugh at it, because that does also call back to Dragon's Lair, which you mentioned you've been playing a lot of the time. The Dragon in Shield 3 or no, sorry, Shield 2, it reminded me. I saw that and I thought, is that the Dragon's Ler, Dragon, the Singe? Well, it's made it easily, you have to have a dragon. Yeah, you can't not have a dragon. So I do want to talk about, like, if it's okay with you, obviously. I wouldn't mind talking about the Genesis version a little bit

because you seem, you did in our email exchange, you did apologize to me. That was my experience with the game. I'm just curious how that came about. Oh, what's the... Well, what had happened is, you know, I left Macromind and I pretty quickly started working on Dark Castle. We got that out in 86.

And then I started on Beyond Dark Castle, and I actually, you know, I did Dark Castle in 85. It came out in 86. I moved to California then, and I got a job at Atari in 86, and I actually finished up beyond Dark Castle for the Macintosh while I was at Atari working on Road Blasters. And because I was at Atari, which obviously, I don't know it was obvious, but to me it was a dream job, right, to work for an arcade company like Atari or the Atari. And I left Dark Castle and Beyond Dark Castle behind me.

And I think I sent you a sheet of all the ports that were made, but it was ported to a a whole bunch of platforms. Yeah. And every time I saw a port, I just got so depressed because they looked so poor. Oh, boy. And, you know, it was, and I knew they were getting probably better distribution than the Mac. Because, I mean, we did very well on the Mac. We maybe sold between the two copies, two titles, maybe 150,000 units or something like that,

which doesn't sound like a lot. But back in the day, then, there was only one million Macs. Yeah. And then on top of that, it had no copy protection. So that thing was copied left and right. And I think anybody who owned a Mac probably played that game. But then if you looked at the Sega versions and the other versions, it was just hard for me to look at them because they were so poorly implemented,

at least in my mind. And part of that had to do also with just the quality of the machines back then. You know, the machines just were not that capable. And so, and the Mac just looked so much better because they had those tiny little pixels and it was black and white only. And you just didn't have that same precision or nice and stuff. of it. But it seems like, you know, one of the guys that's working on the new game actually fondly remembered playing the Mega Drive version. So I guess it's all a question of vantage

point. Oh, no, absolutely. I mean, I'm fond of that version. I don't think that using the D-pad is a tool acceptable for throwing the rocks accurately. It's just far too slow. But that's what I played. I loved it, which is what made me go back and try out the earlier versions when I could get them working. But the games will return the Dark Castle, the game's back. Now it came out yesterday, day before, very recently. Last Tuesday, the third came out. Oh, really? I apologize. That's much further away than I thought. Yeah, return to Dark Castle. I reacquired the rights.

You know, like I said, Charlie Jackson at Silicon Beach, did a bunch of ports, made a bunch of deals, as was the time, you know, like how things were in the day. And then he eventually sold his company to Aldus, which had that pagemaker because they had that super paint program. And Aldous got ended up getting the rights to Dark Castle. and then a gentleman named Joe Williams, in some swap for some technology he had with all this, got the rights to Dark Castle. And he did a colored Dark Castle for the Mac in the mid-90s. And that attracted the attention of a guy named Zach Black. And he started working on a new thing called Return to Dark Castle in the late 90s.

And when I went back to acquire the rights to Dark Castle when I had my company Super Happy Fun Fun Fund in the early 2000s, Joe told me, hey, there's a year. guys working on this new game called Return to Dark Castle. And so I ended up publishing that in 2008, and that was the game that were just republished now. Yeah. And basically what Zach had done is he took all of the Dark Castle levels and all of the beyond Dark Castle levels.

They're all colorized. He really did the art, but they're very accurate. And he added 50 new levels to it. And he did a very good job, I think, of capturing the essence of those games and the challenge of those games. And he got a pretty good following. It did all right in the Mac App Store back in 2008. You know, this is before Apple was, you know, the beast that it is now.

Yeah. And we did all right with the sales there. But then when I started working on this new game, which this is called Dark Castle 4, I reached out to Zach to see if you wanted to join me on. And he says, well, I got, I have it working on Unity now. And so I said, great. So we're publishing it on Steam and it's also in the Mac App Store. It's very happy to see that Apple put it in Feaston.

featured it in games we love, so sales have been nice on that. And the reception has been great. And the game basically is true to form with the original Dark Castle and Beyond Dark Castle, but also has 50 new levels. And it's just incredibly huge games. Zach worked on it for like 12 years. Without the license, without any business deal, just as a fan, and made an excellent game, which, you know, like I say, we sold in 2008.

And then when it showed up and we're able to do it on Unity, now it's on PC, it's on Mac, and it's on Linux, so you can run it on the Steam deck. Yeah, I think it's infinitely fascinating that it's a sort of fan game that you've sort of stepped in. I don't want to say legitimize, officialized, not even a word, but that's what happened, more or less there. Yeah, well, he didn't have any rights to do it, and he actually had my game in there and the characters and everything and the art. And so, you know, he basically has to publish through me, but we get along fine now, and we've worked together on it. And it's been a great relationship. And so, yeah, we just launched that.

It's doing well. I'm very excited about that. And then our next thing on our roadmap is I'm getting, I found a way right now we're going to be able to release the original Dark Castle and the original Beyond Dark Castle. I'm hoping we can do that this summer. Would that be Steam as well? They just like the original black and white versions. Oh, fantastic.

Yeah, it'll be the original black and white version. It'll be scaled up to fit the screen. Obviously, it'll be letterbox a little bit. But it'll be the original game. It's the actual object code running on an emulator. That's awesome. Yeah, so that's coming out this summer. It's all ahead, Beyond Dark Castle and Dark Castle out again so people can play the

originals in addition to return to Dark Castle. And then my hope is that by my intention, not my hope, I'm working on it every day, so it's not just a hope, is to have Dark Castle 4 come out, which I've gone from, you know, 32 pixel high characters that are black and white into 240 tall color. It's all hand-drawn, too. I'm going to stick with that. It's not a reimagined thing. It's the next, you know, it's the next dark castle, although full screen for 4K.

And I'm going to do my best to take everything I've learned in the past 40 years of making games. You know, for the past 30 years, I've been in executive management and production. Yeah. And had some successes there, and that's been really good. But last year, I decided to get back to my creative roots and started drawing and animating again. And I just love it. It's what got me into the industry. You know, I got into the industry not to push GERA tickets.

I got into the industry because I love pixels. And so I've just been having so much fun. So, yeah, Return to Dark Castle just launched last week, and we're all promoting it and doing whatever we can to have a drive success. We have a lot of updates planned for it, too. We're going to have a level editor and a creator of so people can, you know, share levels and stuff like that. If people thought the levels in the game were difficult wait until the custom levels come out.

Well, we had released a level editor a while ago on the 2008 version. And, you know, a small group of people got into it pretty heavily. Yeah. We're going to try to make it a little bit more pedestrian now inside the game so everybody can do it and then hopefully have a place where they can share it and extend the community on that. So have there been any changes in return to Dark Castle? Like, it does seem, as I'm not super familiar with the Macintosh originals, it does seem like it controls sort of one to one, you know, it's the same and it feels the same,

despite looking quite different, obviously. Yeah, he won for one, if you play the Dark Castle levels or Beyond Dark Castle levels, So beyond Dark Castle levels and return to Dark Castle, it is just like, unlike the Sega Mega Drive version, it's just like the original Dark Castle. It's as challenging and you learn how to get around and it's all the same goals are there. But however, instead of in Beyond Dark Castle, you had to find five orbs. Now you have to find 25 orbs, which are located through the whole thing. And then Zach's also allowed you now to not just throw rocks, but in addition to the fireball, you can use some of the weapons and do a number of other things, and there's a couple other new characters in it as well as a bunch of

secret rooms. Yeah, and it's got now an auto save every time you return to sort of the main hallway as well. Yeah. Though it's still very difficult per screen, so I don't think that that's compromised the challenge whatsoever. Yes, I've been enjoying that very much, and I am very interested in what's coming for Dark Castle 4. I must press you if there's anything else you can tell me about the new one at this point. Well, where we're at with the new one I started. Like I said, I decided to go back and do art again, be creative again. You know, I'm at the end of my career now, I'm getting kind of old. But I started drawing.

I just love it. I realized this is why I got into video games. I just love pixels and animating. And I started on that in January or, yeah, January of 25. And by April, a gentleman named Ben Milstead, who is an engineer I knew for a long time, has joined me. And he knows unity. And so we're making it in unity. So it could be, you know, on all different platforms.

Right, right. And we've been working on it. I'm shooting to get it out there. The first goal is to get all the basic navigation from Dark Castle, the climbing the ladders, the throwing the rocks, the getting bit by rats and bats and all that kind of stuff. Get the basic navigation. And we're doing that on a 3D background.

However, it's very much a pixel game. And you're not going into 3D. It's still a 2D platform game, left and right only, totally faithful to Dark Castle. And we're even right now still doing the goofy way of throwing rocks, which once we get everything up and running, I'm going to see how we might improve that or if we might improve that.

And I think I want to make it a little bit more approachable than Dark Castle, because I find that, you know, today's casual audiences are casual. And I wanted to make the entry a little bit easier for people than return in the original games, but I still want it to be just as challenging and have, you know, just more puzzles and more environments

and really want to go for a look that just really knocks you out when you see it. So, I'm under no constraints now. We're self-funded and we want to make a great game. I'd like to kind of like make my big magnum opus here with it. So we'll see if I can meet up that standard. One last thing I'll ask you just real quick. You mentioned the Returns of Darkcastle is on Unity now.

And then you mentioned other platforms. So I'm curious if there's any plans to move that onto for the switch or any other systems. Yeah, I would love, we're waiting to see how we do with sales. You know, if we can hit some certain sales goals on, Steam, then it's worth porting to Switch. We both want to put it on Switch. You know, joystick is not optimal. However, it plays decently on the Steam deck. And also you can plug a joystick into the Mac or into the PC as well. I think it plays well with it. I'd love to get it on Steam. I'd love to get that on Steam. I also like to get the originals, but I'm not Steam on Nintendo

Switch. And I'd like to get the originals on Switch as well. So that's on our roadmap, you know, provided the success is strong enough. Yeah. Okay. Well, everyone listening, please go out and buy immediately in that case. I want it on the Switch. Do it for me if nothing else. Please, please. Come up. I think it would work fine with the right stick, with the right analog stick,

but that's, you know. Yeah, yeah, no, you can play it. It's just, it's not optimal, I think. You know, it's still an, you know, ASDR game. Yeah. I beat the Mega Drive version, therefore, this much better version.

I definitely is feasible on on the Switch on handheld. And yeah, that's all fantastic. I'm really looking forward to Dark Castle 4, and it's really exciting to see this game back, especially so coincidentally about, I got your initial email maybe three weeks after I had done this big deep dive into what is this. I must learn more about this.

So this has been very serendipitous. Thank you. And yeah, all the best for that. I'm really looking forward to the new one and the old ones coming back on Steam as well. Yes. And I will not rest until we have figurines. Oh, excellent. Amoeboes.

And that's our episode. Thanks very much again for listening. If you enjoyed the episode and you want to support Retronauts, you can do so at patreon.com forward slash Retronauts, where for a mere $5 a month, which you have to admit, really quite a small amount of money for what you get, is two extra episodes per month, bonus episodes, completely exclusive to Patreon, as well as early access, one week, early access, in fact, to every episode on the feed. You also get Diamond Fights, excellent this week in retro columns, which are also delivered in the form of podcasts or words, so you can read them with your eyes or whatever. Other fine benefits such as access to the Retronauts Discord await you. And once again, I remind you, on that Discord, you can say anything you like to me, and I'm not allowed to retaliate. That's the main draw. That's all it's used for, as far as I can tell.

But thank you. Thank you very much. I've been Stuart Jep. Hopefully we can get some more cool interviews coming in the future. We've got more great episodes coming up from all of the hosts. And I've got a plan in mind for another very, very long series about another game, with Dave Ballmer and Sherman McDonald's. I just have to get them to agree.

And by agree, I mean I'm going to blackmail them and throw them. threaten their families. Mh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Good night.