It was the time when we started to think more about the world around us and to see through all the lies and official propaganda. Growing up in the Communist bloc, the '80s were very close to us, says Marek. And given their surroundings, it didn't take long to find a suitably rich theme, one that would allow them to create a vast, interactive and dynamic world, through which the player could enjoy almost unbounded freedom. After Gravon, we wanted to create a 3D clone of the 8-bit classic River Raid, but such limited and linear gameplay just didn't inspire us.įor their next point of inspiration, Marek and Ondrej looked closer to home. We always tried to create a game in a large and dynamic exterior world and Flashpoint was our second attempt, says Marek. The first real attempt to fulfil their ambition was Gravon, a futuristic 3D tank game that might have been better remembered had it not been released for the short-lived Atari Falcon, at a time when most computer-gamers had already moved over to PC. There was some recognition for their home-grown talents, but it wasn't until they moved on to bigger and better machines that the idea for an expansive 3D action game began to take root.

Having upgraded to an Atari 800, the two brothers continued to learn their craft, creating a number of titles mostly for their own amusement. I tried to keep up with him but I never could - what took him 15 minutes to code took me a day. Ondrej was always the smarter one, recalls Marek modestly. The duo soon began to enjoy the process of making games more than they did playing them and soon realised that they'd found their calling.

We were probably the only users of that type of computer in the entire country at the time, and the only thing we could do with it was to learn how to program its built-in BASIC language. But the only thing we were concerned with was that we hadn't any games for it - and we really wanted to play games badly. How it got into our home in those old communist days is another story, winks Marek. And to them, this was one Western commodity that was even more valuable than a pair of Levi's. No, there were far more important events unfolding around them, events that would soon result in them being in possession of a Texas Instruments 99/4 home computer with a 3.3MHz processor and a full 16KB of RAM. Not that Marek or elder brother Ondrej could give a toss that the Politburo had just selected Mikhail Gorbachev as the new leader of the Communist Party. While the rest of us were glued to EastEnders or fiddling with transforming robots, the youth that would later found Czech developer Bohemia Interactive Studio was behind the Iron Curtain, unaware that things were about to change forever. 1985 was clearly an important year for Marek Spanel.

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