Life is full of surprises, turning points, coincidences...

I was still a soldier when I met a role-playing fanatic company who wanted to develop a Dungeon master type video game for Amiga. We quickly clicked - although I originally joined the band as a musician, and then I started designing parts of the game myself. Who doesn't know which game it was:

Abandoned Places. A Time for Heroes

And why did it become Abandoned Places? On the one hand, we wanted a good title, and on the other hand, the important point was that when the game appeared, it would be first on the list of stores - we thought it would be easier for players to notice. The subtitle "Time for Heroes" was added by the later English publisher of the game... So the first demo was made, which we took out for Computer Christmas, which was held at the Technical University. We were expecting / believing that someone would notice us there (remember, Novotrade lived its heyday as a developer and publisher), or maybe someone from abroad would come to Budapest looking for such a game. We set up our "stand" on a small table with our machines and the demo of the game (1 MB Amiga 500 powa!) - some people were interested, but only as a "private person" - no business in sight. However, this was one of the most important days of my life, as I met Shy, the editor of Guru disk magazine, later co-founder of Guru magazine, who has been a confidential good friend of mine ever since (among other things, he did the first interview in my life) - but that's another story.

Bottom line, we’re pretty frustrated about the lack of interest because we felt the stuff was good for what we were doing. So we took the "sale" of the game into our own hands - we went through a lot of trouble to find contact data for 20-25 companies, which had to be called one by one (it was no small cost in the pre-internet era), and make them check out the RPG of an unknown Hungarian small team - remember, this is 1989-90, when the Cold War ended... We sent out about 10-15 demos, of which 3-4 substantive answers were received, all in the negative. However, one company, Electronic Arts, wrote that if we replaced the graphics with more beautiful ones and made a better presentation, we should get back to them. After a lot of personal drama (the founding member of the team, the graphic artist had to be fired) came new graphic artists who really redesigned and redrawn the game in a way that was cool back then. It took about 2-3 months for the new demo to be completed, and we were the first to send it to Electronic Arts, who were already a very big company at the time.

Once again we received a negative response: "Sorry, a week ago we agreed with another team to make a similar game. We wish you a lot of success in the future and it is a great pity that the demo did not come 2 weeks ago, as your game is also high quality, but unfortunately we are not able to release two identical games on the same topic," they wrote. There was a lot of sadness as you can expect.

Who / what preceded us was a newly formed company, a certain Raven Software, they sold their first game, a Dungeon Master clone called Black Crypt to Electronic Arts... If we had been a little faster, maybe we would be Raven Software today? Who knows... fact is, they've had a lot of success, and our misfortune continued with the game (but that's another story), which although became an international success, we didn't feel it - and our company / team disappeared forever...