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A trip down (video game) memory lane

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keithbugeja

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This morning I was reminiscing with some colleagues about the golden age of the Amiga, and casually brought up some anecdotes about stuff I had written for it. After some poking I dug up my only surviving artefact from that era: Blaze, a platform game inspired by Sonic the Hedgehog, which I had conveniently converted to ADF some years back. I recorded a video of myself playing the game and posted it to YouTube. Now, I realise that, being the programmer notwithstanding, I suck at playing the game…

Download Blaze ADF.

32 responses to “A trip down (video game) memory lane”

  1. natamix Avatar
    natamix

    I like this . I’m interested in finding unfinished Amiga games

    Reply
  2. keithbugeja Avatar
    keithbugeja

    Link to ADF added at the end of the post.

    Reply
  3. natamix Avatar
    natamix

    Thank you so much for sharing.! 🙂

    Reply
  4. natamix Avatar
    natamix

    Keith. Colin made you the graphics?
    It is for a small post I wanted to write in my blog.

    Reply
    1. keithbugeja Avatar
      keithbugeja

      No, this was a solo project 🙂

      Reply
      1. natamix Avatar
        natamix

        Yes, sorry. I did not realize, I saw in the video after, in the credits

  5. Blaze: Inspirado en Sonic the Hedgehog | AMIGA discovery

    […] vez tenemos suerte, ya que Keith ha sido tan amable de ofrecer una demo en ADF desde su blog para todos los amigueros y también promete escribir un artículo con más información de como se […]

    Reply
  6. natamix Avatar
    natamix

    I really like the effect of water with her reflection at a time, and the speed !

    Reply
  7. Danny Clark Avatar
    Danny Clark

    Well I don’t belong here!

    Reply
  8. Per-Ola Eriksson Avatar
    Per-Ola Eriksson

    I finished the demo and found this very nice and fun , bad there was no soundfx and music , but thanx for this anyway , nice work.

    Reply
    1. keithbugeja Avatar
      keithbugeja

      Thanks! If I remember correctly, the game had soundtracker mod support, but I never got around composing music to go with it.

      Reply
  9. 68060e Avatar
    68060e

    Amazing work!

    Reply
    1. keithbugeja Avatar
      keithbugeja

      Thanks!

      Reply
  10. Ian Avatar
    Ian

    Hey pal, I take it the source code is no longer available?

    Reply
    1. keithbugeja Avatar
      keithbugeja

      I must still have it on Amiga-formatted diskettes, lying around, somewhere… if I come across it, I’ll make sure to convert the disks and post the source, but don’t hold your breath 🙂

      Reply
  11. Vincent GR Avatar
    Vincent GR

    YOU MUST finish it!!!
    Late but better than nothing.

    Reply
  12. Hellstrom Avatar
    Hellstrom

    This is excellent work!

    Fast and smooth, with plenty of colour, too. Even more impressive as it’s running on pre-AGA hardware. You should feel *very* proud of this effort. Can you give us some technical details? How many bitplanes are you using?

    Reply
    1. keithbugeja Avatar
      keithbugeja

      Thanks for your kind comments! For (some) technical details, please check out this post I made on the English Amiga Board: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?p=1051431#post1051431

      Reply
  13. Lost Amiga Platformer “Blaze” Has Been Released | Retro Gamer

    […] If you’re the sort of person who loves Sonic clones, you might just enjoy the newly-released Amiga platformer Blaze. Originally coded in 1993, the game went unreleased until this year when programmer Keith Bugeja unearthed it and released it as an ADF file for emulators. You can check out his blog post and download the game for yourself by clicking here. […]

    Reply
  14. Lost Amiga Platformer “Blaze” Has Been Released | Retro Bunny

    […] If you’re the sort of person who loves Sonic clones, you might just enjoy the newly-released Amiga platformer Blaze. Originally coded in 1993, the game went unreleased until this year when programmer Keith Bugeja unearthed it and released it as an ADF file for emulators. You can check out his blog post and download the game for yourself by clicking here. […]

    Reply
  15. Language Circus Avatar
    Language Circus

    Bugeja is the plural for of “bugs” (computer bugs) in Finnish. Just wanted to let you know. 🙂

    Reply
  16. keithbugeja Avatar
    keithbugeja

    Thanks… maybe I’m still in time for a change in career path… or family name 😀

    Reply
  17. Andy Avatar
    Andy

    Very cool demo-version. Fast scrolling, nice background graphics, good painted and animated sprites and also playability is good. Sadly there are no soundeffects at all included in this demo. Any chance, that you finish this one day or at least insert soundeffects to the demo-version?

    Why you finished this project. Because of copyright-problems (similar to Sonic the Hedgehog) or because of lack of time or motivation back in the day? I think this could have been a top-game on the Amiga500.

    Reply
    1. keithbugeja Avatar
      keithbugeja

      Thanks for your comments. I doubt I’d be able to muster enough motivation to add things like sound effects to the game nowadays. If memory serves me well, I had included a sound tracker module player in the original source but never got around to composing a tune for it.

      Back in the day, I had stopped working on Blaze because something else cropped up – can’t remember but it was probably school or something like that – so you could say it was a lack of time and motivation 🙂

      Reply
      1. Armiga Project Avatar
        Armiga Project

        This game is too good to remain unfinished 😀

        We have a small retro-gaming project and we can talk about funding this and distributing the game with our console. If you are interested, just drop us an email 😉

      2. keithbugeja Avatar
        keithbugeja

        Thanks, I’ll think about it.

  18. natamix Avatar
    natamix

    Hello,
    A very good motivation, might be selling it in box. Some commercial productions are emerging. There are some small market.

    Reply
  19. John Willaford Avatar
    John Willaford

    Hello. Was the source code ever found?

    Reply
  20. Toni L. Avatar
    Toni L.

    Superb looking and playing game. You really need to finish this here. Since some years the retro-wave is rolling and you could use this trend for releasing the game as a half-commercial product for a lower price. I am sure, alot of people would be a downloadable image if the price is not to high and i am also sure that alot of people also would be interested on a physical box of the game and buy it, even when the price then would be higher. Reason why i think so is simple. When looking at some of the new released retro-games, for example “Sam’s Journey” on C-64 and so on, the sales-figures was overwhelming and the people in the “Protovision” shop, which sold the game for the “Knights of Bytes” programers, could hardly keep up with the production of the physical game-boxes cause so many people bought the game in such a short time. Seems like, more and more people having interest in games which have a old-style-look and also plays like that. But the game must be good, otherwise people realize quickly that it was not worth the many. But your game is high-quality, this can already be seen in this short and soon demo-version. So you really should finish this game and then let one of the famous retroshops (RGCD, Protovision, Psytronik) do the selling with a percentage share for you. Of course you will not be a millionaire after it *lol*, but i am sure, you will earn a little bit with it. Also you have the good feeling then, of having produced a game which people will still play in many years. In software-emulators on PC (UAE for example), on FPGA products or as a downloadable version on newer consoles. Who would have thought that, that games which was made in the 80`s for alot of different systems (retro consoles/computers), more then 30 years later, was played in emulators all around the world and the number of these players rising and rising? Crazy thing, but I LIKE IT !!! 🙂

    Reply
  21. Yon H. Avatar
    Yon H.

    Hey man, just thought you should know that your download seems to be busted, can you please fix? Interested in running this demo!

    Reply
    1. keithbugeja Avatar
      keithbugeja

      Hey, you can download the demo from the game’s animet page, here: http://aminet.net/package/game/jump/Blaze

      Reply
  22. El juego de plataformas de Lost Amiga "Blaze" ha sido lanzado – Juegos Retro

    […] para emuladores. Puede consultar su publicación de blog y descargar el juego usted mismo haciendo clic aquí […]

    Reply

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