Whoa. Check out the message left in the Amiga port of Myst (I can’t believe there was an Amiga port of Myst!). The whole thing was encrypted and left in three languages:
THE WHOLE TRUTH ABOUT clickBOOM
We’ll probably never know all of it, but with this message I’ll
give my vision about that.
This message shouldn’t actually never be seen by anyone, but I
wanted to make sure to put something like this somewhere inside the
game, secretly, so that there is an information about who created the
game, and of course, the reason why my name doesn’t appear in the game
itself.
My real name is Djordje Djurdjevic, and I have written all the
code of MYST for Amiga myself (except the QuickTime player subsystem and
the routine for IFF pictures, which has been taken from Aminet and
adapted for the game). I am not Canadian, as said Aleksandar Petrovic,
the manager of clickBOOM (in Amiga Format, I think), but Serb
(Yugoslav), born in Belgrade, old 21 years (born in 1976).
The whole story about clickBOOM begins about 2 years before
Capital Punishment (CP from now) for Amiga was finished. I didn’t know
about the team yet, but only one year after that, in summer 1995. CP
was coded by one person only (Vladimir Ignjatovic) and the graphics were
done by 3 persons (Dragan Jakovljevic, Dusan Gojovic and Ilija
Melentijevic, who left the team in the mean time because of some
disagreements with Aleksandar - Ilija iz one of the idea makers of CP),
all of them Serbs. As I said, I met them and started with another
project from clickBOOM, about a year after CP production started, and it
was about a managment game, which never appeared anywhere.
There were many disagreements and fights in the team, but I
can’t talk about that since I was not directly involved nor present when
it happened, and almost everything I know is based on what other members
of the team clickBOOM told me. Usually, fights were about the money,
because everyone is bad payed (400 DM and less, a month for 8 or
sometimes more hours of work per day), and they started when the
production of the game was to be accelerated because the deadline was
almost expired.
Honestly, CP could have been a much better and interesting game
if Aleksandar Petrovic didn’t force his own will in most important
aspects of the game, such as playability or the graphics (as an example
: the gfx men painted so well one of the characters (Corben Wedge -
originally called “DASA” which means something like guy, buddy) so well
that Aleksandar Petrovic told them to make him look uglier because
everyone would say that it has been scanned). Anyway, what is done is
done. The game was not sold very successfully even if Aleksandar
provided an excellent advertising. Aleksandar promised to pay to the
whole team who made CP a bonus after the job was done. It should have
been payed long time ago (march 97), but until today it hasn’t been
payed.
I accepted to work on MYST (400 DM per month) even if I supposed
that the future of the whole project isn’t very bright. MYST is, as far
as I am concerned, quite a stupid game, but as it’s the best selling
game on PC / MAC, Aleksandar decided to make a conversion for the Amiga,
expecting to get back the money he invested.
Money… He spent a lot of it, but not half of what I think he
should have spent. No software on which worked
coders/graphicians/musicians was legally provided (except PD/SW
software). I will mention, as far as graphics are concerned :
Brilliance, Personal Paint, Deluxe Paint 4.5 and 5, Real 3D, Lightwave
(from version 3.0 to 5.2). Neither on PCs which we worked on the
situation is better : starting with MS DOS, together with Windows 3.11
and 95, and Adobe Premiere and Photoshop and many other software - all
pirate copies. The Lha archiver which was used to archive CP on install
disks requires the lha.key file to work which isn’t registered to
clickBOOM since it is a “crack” and is used by most of the Amiga owners
in Serbia.
Why am I writing all this ? The reason is simple : I should
finish the game MYST quite soon, and I suppose I won’t work for
clickBOOM anymore. I even suppose I won’t get the bonus after the job
is done, as Aleksandar and I agreed before I started the work. Since I
consider that I’ve done my work honestly and the best I could (and it
was not easy since I had to use parts of the original game without any
help of the original authors, and guess what I had to deal with in the
game, and also to do what Aleksandar said what and how it should be
done), I don’t want to loose that money. This is a simple way to force
Aleksandar to do what is his duty (if somebody is thinking about the
word “blackmail” that’s exaclty what I have in mind) if he doesn’t want
to loose credibility in the public.
How can I prove that it’s true ? Simply : since I am the
coder, I’ll get all the source code home, and I’ll leave some useless
parts where I work toghther with the complete source code there where we
work (Olge Alkalaj 7, Beograd, appartment 113) but arhived with a
password only I know, most probably with Diavolo Backup, also pirate
copy.
To prevent that all I sad here was accidentally extracted from a
binary file, I wrote it in 3 languages : serb, english and french, all
mixed together this way - first one letter from the serb text, then from
english and then from french, and again serb… To all the ASCII values
of the letters, a number has been added depending of the position of the
letter - first letter in a row is added with 0, second with 1, etc…
No one should see this message if I don’t want that - and that means
that I sent a little program which decodes all the three texts and saves
them in three different files called cb_s, cb_e and cb_f (for serb,
english and french version) on RAM DISK.
My contact address is : madcat@galeb.etf.bg.ac.yu
I’m a web developer. For years, whenever I was asked to make a web form that required more than the minimum needed personal information I added a comment in the code that read: “We’d like to know a little bit about you for our files. We’d like to help you learn to help yourself.”
Sad and brilliant at the same time. The beauty of the easter egg, of sorts.
Edited: The more I think about it, that story is a little like something one might find leftover in some horrible torture cell, scrawled in blood on the underside of a dislodged paving stone.
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