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HOME / INTERVIEWS / MARK SHEEKY

INTERVIEW - MARK SHEEKY

Amiga Pd are very excited to present an interview with Mark Sheeky who was involved in writing some great shareware games for the Amiga as well as some commercial games. 

Mark has very kindly now made some of these games available as freeware.  To find out more about these games and the history behind his company Scorpius Software read on....

Was the Amiga the first computer you programmed on or were you involved
in 8 bit games?

I first got a Dragon 32 computer, then a Commodore 64. I wrote BASIC games on those first. Just for fun.

What software packages / programming tools did you use to create your
games?

On the Amiga I programmed in assembly language using an assembler from Hisoft. Deluxe Paint and Imagine were used for graphics. Protracker for music. I've forgotten most of it now!

How was Scorpius Software created and how many people were involved with
it?

Just me, I was a big-standard traditional bedroom programmer. I wrote games and needed a name for the company so chose Scorpius. The first was Challenge of the Matrix. It was a long slow haul to increase the quality of the games because I made the graphics and sound and did the programming. It was a lot of work for one person.

You produced a large volume of games on the Amiga and were the sole
individual on the majority of them. Was computer programming your full time
job at this time?

I did it as an obsessive hobby more than a job. I didn't make any money from my Amiga games. 

According to the Hall of Light database Antz was originally planned for
a commercial release. Did the negative previews from the amiga press hinder
this (Amiga format and Amiga Power both stated the game would be fine as a
pd / cover disk rather than commercial title)?

The whole Antz saga was amusing. I wrote this tiny PD game and Tony Dillon saw it, he was a journalist or ex-journalist who used to work for game magazines. He was forming a game company called Killion and he phoned me up telling me that he loved it, that it was the new "Lemmings" and the new "worms" and that Antz was going to make me famous and become a million seller and things like that. I found the whole thing quite funny because the game took me a couple of weeks to make and it still had bugs. He told me
that the journalists he showed it to loved it and that next month there would be full page reviews all over the press. Well, that much was true and the reviews were awful. I didn't hear a thing from Tony then so I just sent it to my usual PD houses like I always used to do with my games. The whole episode still makes me laugh. The reviews were hilarious. I've no idea what
happened to Killion.

Note: The reviews for Ants can be found on the Amiga Magazine Rack website Amiga Format issue 72 and Amiga Power issue 49.

Burnout was one of your commercial releases, was this influenced by the
public domain scene, in particular the game knockout?

I didn't see Knockout until after I'd written Burnout. I thought it would be a good idea to have a racing game where the players bashed each other instead of raced but the tracks posed a problem so I thought making something that could work on one screen was a good option. That was right near the end of the Amiga as a viable games machine. I got a few royalties, about £280 if I remember and that was the only money I ever made from my entire Amiga game programming experience, oh apart from a one-off payment for doing some graphics for a game that I think was called Genetic Species. Vulcan were the only software company that didn't simply steal my games. Those were the days.

Burnout - Long Play video

Video taken from YouTube - video made by cubex55
http://www.recordedamigagames.org

Blade was favourably reviewed in CU Amiga - however the reviewer mentioned that the game may have benefited from extra support on the game - in particular with the 3d modeling- was this something you considered or did you prefer the autonomy of working independently?

I didn't know anyone who could help me.

According to the internet THE HEART OF AORKHAN was a planned sequel to
Blade for the PC however this project was never finished - what was the
reason behind this?

It was too much work. I had a PC that was incapable of running the game engine, the 3D was too much for one screen. I kept working with the hope of getting a better computer one day but sooner or later I realised it was hopeless. After a year of work I stopped and decided to try a simpler game.

Blade was released on both the Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200 - what benefits did
the Amiga 1200 provide you as a programmer compared to the original Amiga 500?

It looked better from what I remember. More memory? I can't remember the difference now! I think the A500 version had worse graphics. I can't at all recall the difference between programming the two.

Blade was released as a budget title by Alive Media Software - how did this come about? Were other publishers interested as well? 

A Burnout fan named Andrew liked my games and was setting up a game publishing company. I signed Blade with him. His partners turned out to be convicted criminals and they published Blade (and other games by other people!) without giving any money to me or Andrew or anyone. This was not the last time a publisher stole my game, it happened a lot on PC too. Things only slowly started to improve when I self-published from my website (remember that in the Amiga days there was no Internet; the web got started right at the end of that machine's life).

Global Thermonuclear Warfare was released as shareware - how did you
decide whether a game would be released as shareware / commercial or
freeware? How successful was the shareware model?

I looked for publishers for years and didn't find any. If I didn't want to give a game away the only option is to make it shareware. It wasn't successful as a business model! I'm pretty sure I didn't receive a single registration payment for any game, although I made a couple of friends who wrote to me about Taskforce when that got onto a CU Amiga disc.

What was the inspiration behind Global Thermonuclear Warfare?

The film WarGames. There was also an (ooooooooold) game called Duck Shoot on I think the Vic20 where you had to type the angle and power to make a shot. That was the main inspiration for the game-play.

Hideous appears to have similarities of various Amiga games of the time in terms of the fonts used (similar to Bitmap Brothers - Xenon), graphics (Shadow of the Beast), Game play (Turrican) - which games did you enjoy playing on the Amiga and how did they influence your games?

The game was originally called Sentinel. It was influenced primarily by Zamzara on the C64. I never played a Bitmap Brothers game! My favourite games involved some thought or strategy. On the Amiga my favourites were UFO: Enemy Unknown (X-COM) and Frontier: Elite 2.

The Sentinel was reviewed in issue 38 of Amiga Power but was heavily criticised for crashing every 3 - 4 minutes - Did they receive a faulty version or did the game contain unstable elements which would cause it to crash?

I didn't know about that! They might have had a bad copy or the machine might have been incompatible in some way. I've got a good review of it so someone did get it to work somehow.

NOTE: This seems correct as the youtube below shows the game working fine.

Video of Hideous / Sentinel Gameplay

YouTube video of the gameplay of Hideous (A.K.A. Sentinel) by YouTube member - wandererlain.

The Hall of Light database states that Andrew Cashmore provided the
graphics for Hilt and Hilt 2 - are you still in contact with Andrew and did you assist him with his game Jump Em?

Yes I've just made contact again thanks to Facebook, after a few years of silence. He wrote to me after he played Taskforce. He liked doing the graphics more than I did. It was a chore for me and I didn't like it. I didn't really do much with Jump-Em, just play-tested it a bit here and there. I said it was okay if he used the Scorpius name.

What improvements were added to Hilt 2?

Hilt 2 is a completely different game from Hilt. Hilt was based on Larn, a Rogue/Hack variant. Hilt 2 was a squad-based military strategy game like UFO or Laser Squad (although at that stage I'd not played either - and I still haven't played Laser Squad!) Hilt 2 was more like a sequel to Taskforce but with some ideas about turn based games that Andrew told me about, like having Action Points. My first PC game, a game called Arcangel was effectively the PC version of Hilt 2. Some of the maps were even the same. Arcangel was isometric instead of top-down though. Years later I made Taskforce on PC which is 3D and effectively the last in the series (well... as of 2011).

You have produced games covering a variety of genres, RPG, platform
games and Shoot em ups. Which genre did you prefer programming / working on?

They're all the same really although I like the strategic ones and the fast shooters best. Platformers are tricky because of collision detection - Sentinel/Hideous was difficult for that reason!

Which genre of games was the most difficult to programme?

No difference. The amount of graphics and levels is the biggest hindrance to development so as my games changed (on Windows too) I began to think of games that were fun to play with a limited amount of graphics.

How were games play tested during development?

I tended to make a development plan and stick to it, playing at the end and making adjustments. I often didn't test enough and just thought "this is complete" then moved on. I should have tested and adjusted more back then!

Outliner and a few of your other games were released by 5th Dimension -
How supportive were they as a publisher?

They were a PD house called Saddletramps that also released shareware. There were lots of PD companies back then, small shops or individuals with lots of discs that they swapped. 5th Dimension was an idea to sell games and start as a small publisher. He was a nice guy but the games didn't sell well so the idea didn't really work. Hilt 2 sold less than ten copies so I eventually made it freeware.

Outliner, Roton and Overlander seem to be modern updates of classic
arcade games from the 80s - which games did you enjoy playing most from the
arcades during this time? Were there any additional ones you wished you had
taken time to port to the Amiga?

Outliner/Roton were the same sort of game, I liked Asteroids and wanted one that used the mouse. Overlander came about because of Lunar Rover Patrol on the Dragon 32. I used to play those 8-bit games but not so many in arcades. My Commodore64 and Dragon games were perhaps my biggest influence. There aren't any I'd wanted to convert. I don't like computer games any more! I find it hard to imagine what I wanted or was thinking of back then.

Overlander - Video of Gameplay

YouTube video created by EAB Forum member S2325

Download - Mark Sheeky's Games

The file below contains all the Games Mark Sheeky has made available as freeware.  Burnout is not available as the copyright is still held by the publisher.

scorpiusgames.zip
File Size:	9576 kb
File Type:	zip

Download File

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The Challenge of the Matrix - September 1991

Screenshots are taken from Hall of Light website.

Spectrum - December 1991

Screenshots are taken from Hall of Light website.

Liberator - March 1992

Screenshots are taken from Hall of Light website.

One on One - June 1992

Screenshots are taken from Hall of Light website.

Turbo Thrust - September 1992

Screenshots are taken from Hall of Light website.

Arazmax - August 1992

Screenshots are taken from Hall of Light website.

Roton - September 1992

Screenshots are taken from Hall of Light website.

Hideous - A.K.A. Sentinel - July 1993

Screenshots are taken from Hall of Light website.

Firefly - August 1993

Screenshots are taken from Hall of Light website.

Taskforce - June 1994

Screenshots are taken from Hall of Light website.

Rage - October 1994

Screenshots are taken from Hall of Light website.

Overlander - April 1994

Screenshots are taken from Hall of Light website.

Global Thermonuclear Warfare - May 1994

Screenshots are taken from Hall of Light website.

Hilt: Against The Hoardes - August 1994

Screenshots are taken from Hall of Light website.

A Video of Hilt can be found here.

Xenex - October 1994

Screenshots are taken from Hall of Light website.

Antz - March 1995

Screenshots are taken from Hall of Light website.

Hilt 2 - January 1996

Screenshots are taken from Hall of Light website.

A Video of Hilt 2 can be found here.

Outliner - February 1996

Screenshots are taken from Hall of Light website.

Burnout - September 1996

Screenshots are taken from Hall of Light website.

Blade August 1997

Screenshots are taken from Hall of Light website.

A Video of Blade can be found here.

Were there any game projects which were left unfinished or unpublished?
If so are there any playable demos which still survive?

Not on Amga. Everything was "published" in some way becuase I've made everthing free. I've lost a lot though, particularly some "CDA Digialbums" I made, PD disks, my very earliest music. When I switched to PC the Amiga disks became useless. Juergen Beck from Back 2 The Roots helped me put my Amiga games and the source code onto CD for me, so that stopped things being lost forever (that said I'm now wondering if I have any of that left on my PC - think it's all gone for good!)

On your website you describes yourself as an artist, musician and
computer programmer. Which of these activities do you enjoy the most and
what are you currently working on?

I'm an artist now and I don't play games or program them. I paint fantastical oil paintings, and I write music for my small label Cornutopia Music, and I still write game music and sound effects for my website IndieSFX. Flatspace II on PC is still quite a popular game and I've kept hold of the Flatspace 3 plans but I haven't programmed the computer in years. For the time being I'm happy working as an artist.

Thank You

AmigaPd would like to thank Mark Sheeky for his time and support with creating this page.  Remember to visit his current website to see his current projects.