Doom clone: Abandoned

[seanmcmanus]

I just saw that the last issue of AA had an ad from Radical Software where they said they would be releasing a Doom clone called Abandoned. Does anyone know what happened about this? Did it ever come out, or was the game itself (ahem!) abandoned when there was no magazine to promote it any more?

[Gryzor]

Oh I thought there was a Doom clone in the works and it was abandoned, from the subject line.

[Gryzor]

Older thread when googling for the game 

https://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/games/whatever-happened-to-abandoned-by-radical-software/

[poulette73]

There's a nice clone, working on SymbOS. 

"Doom for SymbOS" :  https://www.symbos.org/appinfo.htm?00043

I happen to play it from time to time. 

[seanmcmanus]

Sorry for the confusion! Didn't mean to get anyone excited!

Thanks for those pointers. I should have thought to search the forum first.

[Prodatron]

I just saw that the last issue of AA had an ad from Radical Software where they said they would be releasing a Doom clone called Abandoned. Does anyone know what happened about this? Did it ever come out, or was the game itself (ahem!) abandoned when there was no magazine to promote it any more?

I just asked Trebmint (Rob, Radical Software), and this is his comment:

"Yes Radical software died with AA. There was little point then of continuing developing as there was no means to push it. Abandoned was yes Abandoned. Its was very early development and not much more than a tech demo TBH. That Fluff 2 and a text adventure which were all started, but stopped"

Thanks for the other links, I didnt know about these other projects.

[seanmcmanus]

Thank you for looking into it. I thought that was probably the case. It's a shame it doesn't survive, as Rob said on another thread, but I guess none of us could have predicted that there would be this online community with an interest in it decades later.

I was looking at the final AA for a piece I've written for Amtix about the final issues of Amstrad magazines.

[Anthony Flack]

It's interesting that the end of Amstrad Action was what led to the games being cancelled.

[seanmcmanus]

It's interesting that the end of Amstrad Action was what led to the games being cancelled.

It would have been really hard to sell games (or even give them away) in any great quantity without Amstrad Action to promote them. There were fanzines, but I doubt any of them had anywhere near the 15,000 readers AA had, even at the end.

[Shaun M. Neary]

It's interesting that the end of Amstrad Action was what led to the games being cancelled.

By mid 1995 when AA had gone under, while the internet was starting to bubble, there were only a handful of places to talk/promote Amstrad CPC related stuff

NVG was your games resource (still around, thanks @Nich)
Kev Thackers CPC resource
T.A.C.G.R
and comp.sys.amstrad.8bit on usenet.

Those were the big ones at the time, more came and went since. So it was very much hobbyist, and next to near impossible, as Sean said to give a game away nevermind try to sell it.

By 2000, the internet community for the CPC had significantly grown. It's kinda mind blowing to see how much had happened in those five years between 95-00. Especially when you see what we have now compared to what we had 25 years ago!

[Anthony Flack]

In 1995 I had started visiting T.A.C.G.R on the university internet and downloading stuff onto floppy disks at 20c per megabyte...!

I think it's interesting to consider how the end of the CPC's commercial life was defined by magazines, and how the resurgence of interest in these old machines was directly tied to the internet. If we still had no internet now, would there even be a retro scene? The only reason I can code CPC games today is because all the information is online. 

[dodogildo]

I just asked Trebmint (Rob, Radical Software), and this is his comment:

"Yes Radical software died with AA. There was little point then of continuing developing as there was no means to push it. Abandoned was yes Abandoned. Its was very early development and not much more than a tech demo TBH. That Fluff 2 and a text adventure which were all started, but stopped"

Thank you! Good journalism. 

[Shaun M. Neary]

In 1995 I had started visiting T.A.C.G.R on the university internet and downloading stuff onto floppy disks at 20c per megabyte...!

I think it's interesting to consider how the end of the CPC's commercial life was defined by magazines, and how the resurgence of interest in these old machines was directly tied to the internet. If we still had no internet now, would there even be a retro scene? The only reason I can code CPC games today is because all the information is online.

Different world then. Publications didn't see the bigger picture then. The likes of Future Publishing thought circulation was still king...

If it wasn't for CPCZone (hey Malc, at least release your code to folks who could benefit from it!), CPC Wiki, CPC Power and cpcrulez.fr (Because fuck digital watermarking), the Amstrad community would be dead in the water apart from NVG, awesome as it was and still is, but it's the last thing that comes to searches.

Personally I have respect for both, but at that time, it was all moving in a certain direction, which I'm thankful for because I've made some lifelong friends as a result of said direction.