Illustrating dreams since 1992
GAMBYS - 1993/95
In 1993, a couple of years before the Internet really took off as we know it, when 486 PCs at 66 MHz were the rule, the first Portuguese Video game was planned by a small creative team.
THE FIRST PROFESSIONALLY PRODUCED PORTUGUESE PC GAME
Video Games History / Retro Gaming : A look back in time.
A long, long time ago…
We tried to use 3D Studio to create as much as we could, although the in-game graphics
were done pixel by pixel in Deluxe Paint by me, also…frame by frame, pixel by pixel.
It was a small team: just me for graphics, concept art, animation, and graphic design, about three
or four programmers,s and a few in-house beta-testers.
Back then, no online videos, no Facebook, no social media, and no internet.
Just PCs that a couple years back only had those pre-historic green screens but back in 1993 they were starting to handle 256 colors ! Wow ! A PC computer with a color screen ! How crazy was that !!
And we even had CD Roms and everything !! Games on CDs !
Photoshop was just a name as the software was less known than Deluxe Paint for DOS, no Instagram, no Facebook, no World of Warcraft, no game consoles and not even a third wheel on the pc mouse yet. Yes, a mouse with two buttons only and a roller sphere ! In short…pre-history.
These were the times, when Portuguese programmers Carlos Leote and Rui Tito, who had played and created ZX Spectrum computer video games with good video game reviews back in the 80´s
started to experiment with game programming for the Pc.
I joined the team for the Gambys project, but I had played many of these ZX Spectrum games without ever knowing they had been made not only in Portugal but in my own hometown.
Mainly, games like Krall and Alien Evolution.
But by 1993/94, ZX Spectrum had been dead for a while, PCs were starting to emerge as game machines and Lemmings, the video game was the latest craze in 256 colours.
2D puzzle games were about what PCs could technically handle, and so the natural idea within our group was to create something like that as the first Portuguese PC Videogame.
Getting professional with GAMBYS
So ©Gambys was the first serious and 100% professional attempt by friends who invented games in Portugal, to create computer video games that could compare to the best that was coming from England in the PC Puzzle area at the time, mainly from Psygnosis and Virgin Games.
The objective was to make the most professional game we could do with the little resources we had and not a great amount of money from the company wich was investing in the project to work with.
It was also a technical challenge because, at the time GAMBYS was aiming to be the first, or one of the first games in the world of PC gaming, to display 65.000 colors on screen, as the norm was still the old 256 colors. And it did that in the end.
The game was going to be released outside Portugal , either by Virgin Games or Psygnosis at the time, as we had several meetings with people the companies sent to check out our work in-house but unfortunately we completed the game right at the time that WINDOWS 95 came out and suddenly nobody wanted to release DOS Games anymore as there was that new thing called Windows and so we ended up releasing the game only in Portugal and Spain. Good reviews though, got to be game of the month in several magazines and all that but Windows was really a big problem for us.
What is GAMBYS ? Click here to find out.
The game made its money back, but the company went into hospitality software as business software was easier to do and a lot more immediate when it comes to money results, and so GAMBYS
ended up becoming not only the first Portuguese PC game ever produced professionally
in Portugal but also the only game we did at the time.
Also, the Internet was still in the begining and so there was no social media to promote games,
and for a small independent company, really far from Lisbon the Portuguese capital,
it was almost impossible to promote a project like this
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