This is an appendix to the Where We Came From series.

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For Mercenary, author Paul Woakes, has created what can only be described as a world simulator. The first release using this technique is sub-titled “Escape From Targ”.

– Mercenary: Escape from Targ instructions

Paul Woakes’ debut title on the Atari 8-bit home computer was a tense and memorable re-imagining of Battlezone (Atari, 1980) called Encounter! (Novagen Software, 1984), using vibrant raster graphics instead of the flickering green wireframes of the Atari arcade original. It quickly became a favourite for Atari owners who liked their action games to be fast and responsive.

From A.N.A.L.O.G Magazine #20 (July 1984)
From A.N.A.L.O.G Magazine #20 (July 1984)

Shortly after, hints of Woakes’ followup title began to seep into the news sections of computer magazines. What could Atari owners expect next from a developer whose first title had conquered the action genre?

A first-person 3D open world offering intrigue and complete freedom to explore a planet.

In 1985.  

Mercenary: Escape from Targ (Novagen Software, 1985) is one of four key titles that defined virtual exploration in my early, formative years of computer gaming. Along with the seminal Atari console game Adventure, (Atari, 1979), Ultima IV: Quest for the Avatar (Origin Systems, 1985), and the unfinished, ridiculously ambitious Alternate Reality series (Paradise Programming, 1985-87), Mercenary invited you to explore a world that only existed inside the electronic brain of a computer.

Perspective

It’s important to grasp the context in which Mercenary emerged.

Three-dimensional graphics were not new. A decade earlier, the original Maze War (Steve Colley, 1974) was able to challenge a player to escape a 3D maze, using some clever shortcuts in the design to reduce computational cost: the maze was made of square tiles; the player was only permitted coarse movement, stepping from one tile to another; the player could only face in a direction aligned with the tiles, no free rotation was possible; open areas could not be rendered meaning the game consisted solely of narrow corridors.

This implementation was so cheap that it would turn up again and again in videogames over the years. Richard Garriott championed it in the Ultima series, with dungeons being represented as 3D mazes and there were even examples on the relatively underpowered hardware of the Atari 2600 console such as Escape from the Mindmaster (Starpath, 1982). Dungeon Master (FTL Games, 1987) picked up the torch and, even today, the tile-based maze game has seen a revival in Legend of Grimrock (Almost Human, 2012).

Environments where players had full 360º freedom were far less common. We’ve mentioned Battlezone but it was preceded by Star Raiders (Atari, 1979) which pulled off a free-roaming 3D space dogfight using raster graphics, juggling a handful of objects on screen with just 8K of memory. Paul Edelstein’s Way Out (Sirius Software, 1982) might have been just another 3D maze game but it embraced open areas and allowed the player full rotational freedom. Its split screen two-player sequel Capture the Flag (Sirius Software, 1984) went a step further with dynamic music.

capture-the-flag

Others were working on more sophisticated 3D implementations. Bruce Artwick had started working on the monochrome Flight Simulator (subLOGIC, 1979) in the mid-70s, which used wireframe graphics to simulate the world. Artwick’s sequel, Flight Simulator II (subLOGIC, 1984), had both colour and a smattering of buildings with full surface rendering like the Statue of Liberty.

But mention “vector graphics open world” to anyone who was alive during this era and it’s far more likely the BBC Micro game Elite (David Braben & Ian Bell, 1984) will bubble into the conversation than any other title. It sported full-on wireframe graphics with surface occlusion and attached it to a massive procedurally-generated universe that boggled the mind of the average 80s gamer.

Here’s the thing: Elite is like an interstellar subway system of planetary islands connected by hyperspace jumps and does not offer the sort of contiguous, explorable space that FSII does. Some of us were logging a lot of hours in the apparently torpid experience of FSII, flying between US landmarks and along jagged shorelines. I did not care so much for simulated flying; learning how to take off and triangulate my position was a means to an end – to find what was out there.

Flight Simulator II (Atari 8-bit)

We imagined far more than the software presented and glitches in the fabric of airspace gave rise to weird folklore, like a pyramid hanging in the sky, inexplicable ground features and what happens if you sail off the edge of the map.

IBM PC Flight Simulator - Pyramid

Which brings me, finally, to this: with Mercenary, developer Paul Woakes asked what happens if we took the “simulator” out of FSII, showered the world with stuff to see and gave the player a goal. It is an ancient precursor to the authored open worlds we have seen over the years in the AAA space, with GTA V (Rockstar North, 2013) and Skyrim (Bethesda Game Studios, 2011) being well-known recent examples. However, modern open worlds are heavily dependent on violence as the method of progress whereas Mercenary – like other avant-garde games of the era – does not consider shooting things to be all that important. Mercenary is a secret box game for the self-directed player.

I have been planning to write about Mercenary for a long time. Originally I was going to interview Paul Woakes and do a short piece on Mercenary for the Where We Came From series, but like everybody else in the videogame world I was unable to track him down and the idea was put on ice. Just as I was contemplating writing something on Mercenary again, Eurogamer beat me to the retrospective punch a few months ago.

But this is no retread of nostalgia lane. I want to take you on a trip to the planet Targ, explaining why Mercenary should have been important instead of sinking without a trace.

Here I’m running a modern PC implementation of Mercenary called The MDDClone (Unknown, 2007).

Arrival

We’re witnessing an in-game cutscene. Our interstellar craft, the Prestinium, is en route to Gamma-Five for some undisclosed work. The stars in space are the closest we get to a title screen as Woakes has handed the game to us unadorned. Such restraint suggests both confidence and an aspiration to something greater than merely blasting aliens to pixel bits.

Yet it is a strange design decision. The game could be purchased on cassette tape and few would sit around and wait for the game to load; no title screen meant the game could start while we were out of the room.

The next thing we know there’s a malfunction and we are heading

mddclone-prestinium-space

straight

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down

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Benson, a ninth generation PC, is the players communications link and interface with the total environment.

– Mercenary: Escape from Targ instructions

“Benson” is our in-game computer companion who is initially very chatty. Just as we hit the ground, he switches the ship to manual control as if to escape culpability and then chides us with “good landing” or something similar. Next, he rattles off some thin exposition: we’ve crashed on the planet Targ, and there’s an ongoing war here between the Palyars and Mechanoids – and, hey, look there’s an aircraft conveniently sitting right here at the crash site.

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Crashed Prestinium in background to the right; note also the inconspicuous white dot

The Palyars are the natives and the Mechanoids are the invading force. But “Palyar” is a minor permutation of the word “player” which suggests the plot is just… players versus machine. (Aside: A more contemporary interpretation of a videogame would be players pitting their wits against the game’s developers.)

This careless framing suggests our stay on Targ will be light on narrative meat. I cannot deny that Mercenary has little plot, and the badly-written short story “Interlude on Targ” that was later released in an attempt to retcon in some depth that did not exist in the first place was never going to remedy that. But do not be fooled; Mercenary is rich with environmental narrative and mysteries with no clear answers.

We’re at an airbase at location 08-08 and Benson pushes us to buy the Dart for 5000 credits. We only have 9000 credits. If we wait, Benson continues to prompt and wonders if we intend to walk everywhere. So is there a real choice here?

It’s not signposted but there is. We can steal the Dart. There’s nothing stopping us boarding the Dart and making off with it. As soon as we do, of course, Benson announces that this ship belonged to the “Palyar Commander’s Brother-in-law” and the Palyars launch a ship to intercept us. Attack craft magically pop out of the airbase and if we don’t take off quickly, we’ll be blown away in seconds.

So up we go and when we spin around, we can watch the attack pod come out to greet us.

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But death has no place in Mercenary. If we screw up and the pod blasts us out of the sky, we crash to the ground unharmed, minus one ship. As it’s quite likely we would be stranded in the middle of nowhere and Targ is just too big to be walked around, hitting CTRL-Q on the keyboard will summon up another Dart for us. It’s not entirely consequence-free and I’ll come back to this muuuuch later.

No one would play Mercenary for the joys of aerial combat, but we have weaponry and can eliminate the threat. Once the pod is dispatched, it’s time to explore.

The City

The planet Targ, has one major area of habitation, surrounded by an vast wasteland. This ‘city’ has a road network linking hundreds of fascinating structures. There are a number of subterranean complexes both beneath the city and beyond.

– Mercenary: Escape from Targ instructions

We go north-east and hit our first road at 09-07. We spy an unremarkable box building, but more interesting is that dot hovering in the sky above the landscape to the west. We head towards it and take note of the sights along the way.

mddclone-09-07-box

The excitement of a vector graphics city rendered in real-time is tempered by the realisation that there’s only one building at the centre of every location node. Back in 1985 this was exciting but already we would have twigged the city was sparsely populated.

However, the dimensions of the city ensure we never quite feel confident about knowing it. It’s so big we can get lost in the vast green spaces between buildings and easily veer off course if we’re not used to the compass. I played on a small black-and-white television back in the 80s and the Atari 8-bit rendering of the compass used colours to indicate direction, so I was screwed from the get-go. The version implemented in the MDDClone dispenses with colours and instead offers a full 360 degree figuration.

mddclone-08-07-bosher-stadium

At 08-07 is one of the city’s famous landmarks. It’s called Bosher Stadium. How would we know this? Does Benson tell us? Yes. We just have to blow it up first.

Firing a missile at the base of a structure will cause its wireframe to collapse to the ground and Benson will then tell us if the building had a name. Virtually every named building will spring an attack by the locals.

mddclone-07-07-vase-building

Long-time Electron Dance reader Ben Schroder once told me he enjoyed what I wrote on Dishonored (Arkane Studios, 2012) and he skewered the Heart with a term I instantly loved – he called it the “exposition gun”. I feel some kinship with Mercenary’s weaponry: only by destroying buildings can you find out anything about them. How about that for some creepy foreshadowing of how bullets are the only way to tell stories today?

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The player can occupy various types of flying craft and ground-based vehicles and is able to walk about. This total ‘freedom of movement’ facility creates a very realistic experience given Benson’s interpretation of events in three-dimensional vector graphics of stunning perspective. Every player will enjoy the exploration of Targ.

– Mercenary: Escape from Targ instructions

For a three-dimensional world, Mercenary would have been defeated by the graphically superior Rescue on Fractalus! (Lucasfilm Games, 1984) one year earlier, which featured fractal-driven rocky crags to fly around. But there was character to the world of Mercenary, and some wry British humour – for example, the Palyar Commander Brother-in-law’s house can be found in the City, which you only discover if you blow it up.

But there’s a graphical shame that runs through Mercenary which sometimes afflicted games of the era. With all the talk about computers being the future and the so-called realism of computer simulations, there was a fear of admitting abstraction, a guilt that games do not resemble the real world. The game instructions effectively tell you that Benson turns the world into a videogame because it’s an easier way to deal with reality. That’s right. Benson is Jane McGonigal.

Mainstream games have never thrown off this fear and, even today, continue to descend further into the dark and dangerous waters of photorealism.

mddclone-05-07-skyscraper

As I eluded earlier, Benson falls quiet once the initial exposition is over. I begged the game to tell me more about the world but all I had to go on were the structures themselves, their locations and relationships to each other. I spent a lot of time in Mercenary flying around and flying theories about whether an important-looking building was actually important, constructing my own interpretation of Targ.

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Targ is another dead videogame world, of course. There’s no real explanation in the game or instructions as to where the Palyars or Mechanoids are. Aside from one exception, we meet no one physically. Filling worlds with people is of course extremely hard and creates even more uncanny valley shame for developers: chairs are not expected to have reactions, but people are.

mddclone-02-08-star-building

The formerly peaceful inhabitants of Targ, the Palyars, are now in continuing conflict with the usurper Mechanoids, an alien race of robots. The Palyar Council are housed in the comparative security of their Colony Craft – a defensive stronghold in orbit above the planet. Remnants of Palyar forces form pockets of resistance within the city.

– Mercenary: Escape from Targ instructions

War is essentially the cover for the population going into hiding, but it doesn’t add up. The novelty of the Mercenary experience and being able to explore a virtual world and go wherever the Hell we wanted prevented these questions from developing into a problem. If anything, it made the game more mysterious. I often suspected the population were actually milling around but Benson didn’t render them as they offered neither value nor threat. If true, it means the Benson-outfitted player was almost certainly one of the Star Trek Borg.

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We hit the edge of the city then follow the road south towards the dot. What are these crazy places? This structure at 01-09 looks like a rocket or a dart of some kind – is it just some dreary office block or a place of exquisite beauty?

Finally, we catch up with the dot. Guess what. It’s another Dart flying around.

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Whose ship is this? There is only one way to find out which is to shoot it. If we did, we would discover this Dart is the Palyar Commander Brother-in-law’s ship as well and shooting it down will earn the ire of the Palyars again.

But let me leave you with one little clue to Mercenary‘s sandbox nature, because little is signposted in the game. If you’re really good at exploring the distant edges of the Mercenary’s mechanics… it’s possible to capture this ship and fly it around. Like I said, Mercenary does not consider shooting things to be all that important.

Okay, let’s do something else now. Let’s fly out of the city into the barren wasteland. Is there anything out there?

The Wasteland

mddclone--05-17-city-view

Note one of the location co-ordinates has turned red which means it’s a negative co-ordinate. The city is contained within a 15 x 15 grid and we’ve just tiptoed over one of its edges.

But what are the three white dots we can see? The dot in the middle is the airbase with the crashed Prestinium. Another is the Palyar Commander’s Brother-in-law’s ship we were following around. What’s the third?

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At 12-13, it’s Jordan Airport and the dot is this small car. We can take the car instead of the Dart but it’s slow and ground transport feels more disorienting than flying.

Let’s fly back out.

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Right, we might now ask what the Hell is that dot outside the city?

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At this remote location, there’s this… thing. Thirty years on and I still have no idea what this is supposed to be. It doesn’t seem to do anything. It looks like a drill or possibly a rocket. Maybe it’s an ancient monument? But the author clearly wanted us to find it outside the city. Why is it here? What does it mean? I wasted a lot of time trying to cajole static objects into doing something signficant. Do I regret that time? No. It was part of the open-world mystery and even today I still squander time poking at modern open worlds like GTA, trying to prise out their secrets.

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Let’s zoom back out and – wait, another dot?

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We’re very far out now. The second remote dot turns out to be a pyramid. Again, the game offers no explanation for what this is. You can’t do anything with it. I’m guessing it’s meant to be some ancient pyramid, an indication of an ancient race that once dwelt on this planet.

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Okay zooming out again and… yet another dot far from home. Perhaps the real purpose of these dots are breadcrumbs the developer has laid for us to follow him out into wasteland. Back in the day, I spent a long time mapping the wasteland, worried I had missed some vital clue, some puzzle piece which would solve the narrative mysteries of the Targ landscape. I wanted to find every secret structure out there. Things no one needed to find but would make fine stories to tell.

Like this one.

Out here, in a location so remote the co-ordinates collapse into asterisks, we find…

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An elevator in the middle of the wilderness!

Elevators provide access to the underground which, as you will discover, is where we will spend most of our time in this game. Hitting “E” on the keyboard activates the elevator and we descend into a secret complex far from the city.

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It does not take long to explore, though. In the main hangar, we find a new craft. We will be leaving with this as it is much faster than the Dominion Dart we stole.

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In the adjoining room there is an object that looks like a carton of milk. We pick it up using the “G” key and Benson informs us it is “Winchester”. The next door out of here is oddly-shaped which turns out to be… LOCKED.

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It’s tantalizing. A locked door? What’s behind the locked door? Where is the key? This being a computer game we assume we will find a key somewhere. But our exploration at this desolate place has come to an end already.

Let’s fly back to the city in our new craft.

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It’s about time we started figuring out a way off Targ and now I need to explain the consequences of the Dart theft we carried out earlier. If we had bought the Dominion Dart, the Palyars would have followed up with a job offer, summoning us to their briefing room at 09-06. However, stealing the Dart means they are not inclined to offer us anything.

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So we’re going to head to 09-06 because I know from previous experience that’s where we’re meant to go.

And it’s here the adventure really begins.

The next part of The First Open World is now up – what can we find below Targ?

How can I play Mercenary today?

Just go to the excellent Mercenary site and download the MDDClone from there. Check the included readme file for instructions how to play. The original Mercenary instructions can be found on the site as well.

If you get stuck, you can have a look at the official Targ Survival Kit or, if you really just want to complete the game, a walkthrough.

 

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21 thoughts on “The First Open World, Part One

  1. A part of me wishes that I had been old enough to play some of these classics back in the 80s. I had no idea this game existed until now.

    It’s not the same, but I have fond memories of exploring Arrakis by Ornithopter in Cryo’s Dune. The planet had fewer features, of course, but there was quite a thrill in exploring a region you knew must contain a sietch, and having one of your passengers spot it and point it out. All the more so if you spotted it on-screen just before they alerted you to it.

  2. Hey Shaun. Yeah, I don’t know if Mercenary is “worth” the time these days with all the open worlds we have. But I don’t think it’s as annoying as, say, Ultima IV or Alternate Reality is especially as the made-for-PC MDDClone is pretty responsive.

    I find it interesting that exploration elements in games have fascinated many of us, but developers increasingly looked for ways to “incentivize” exploration in the mechanics instead of just letting these places be.

  3. I can certainly think of few contemporary concepts as likely to put me off exploring a game world as collection quests, whether they are ridiculously obtuse (GTA IV’s pigeons) or easy to locate (pretty much anything else).

  4. I had no idea this game existed! I’m amazed that they were able to pull something like this off – though I was equally amazed by the fractal landscapes in “Rescue on Fractalus”. I must admit, though, I’m a bit confused by your praise: on the one hand you say the game has an incredible amount of lore, exploration and storytelling, but you can only learn it by blowing it up, and even then all you get is the name assigned to a polyhedron? Maybe it’ll become clearer in the next issue.

    About exploration and incentives: that’s a good point. I do love exploring in games, and I love learning about the places I’m exploring (assuming they’re interesting enough). What’s interesting to me, though, is that I don’t usually stray off the beaten track with open world games. In Assassin’s Creed games, for example, I hardly ever pick a landmark and go for it; instead I pick a quest (from the map or a menu) and go for *that*.

    I think this is due to 2 things: 1) I know that these games have quest lines in order to propel you through the experience, so I know that if I follow the quest (line of least resistance) it’ll all come right in the end. This might not be the best way to design such a game, but because it’s become expected in this genre it sort of works for me. But more interesting is: 2) These games don’t generally have much *in* their open worlds to explore. Okay, so there’s a tall building or something, but the game is filled with tall buildings. There isn’t the equivalent of a unique building that has real lore significance, or a special book or item you can find that tells you something about the world. Instead it’s a more or less undifferentiated field of city-sprawl: sometimes it’s posher and higher, and sometimes it’s dingier and lower, but it’s a quantitative difference, not qualitative. So there’s really no point to exploring, because you won’t learn anything – you’ll just see “Oh look, it’s that building I saw on my holiday to Rome last year, let’s climb it”.

  5. Hey James. Let me clarify issues regarding story!

    What motivated me to write about Mercenary initially was the “exposition gun”. It’s mad that the only way to find out about the buildings is to blow them up; I think it’s a joke in retrospect, that all you can do with this “grand architecture” is blow it up. So every now and then, you get told, oh by the way, that silly vector line structure you just destroyed? THAT’S THE WALTON MONUMENT, DEDICATED TO THE GREAT ARCHITECT, you clod. These nuggets were not intended as story but as jokes (there are two structures you are actually saluted for destroying). But we took them on as story because they were the only details were were given. I see Mercenary as throwing a lot of things at the canvas and seeing what worked. There is no proper storytelling here.

    “But do not be fooled; Mercenary is rich with environmental narrative and mysteries with no clear answers.” I mean that. All those structures make you wonder at what you’re actually seeing; why are all those structures out there in the wasteland? Where did Jordan Airport fly to? Who is Walton? You’ll also realise there are a clear demarcation of Palyar and Mechanoid structures beneath the city – it’s not signposted, you just figure it out. There’s so much implied in the game that develops that you develop a real feeling for the city. And that’s what I mean– environmental narrative, but no concrete storytelling.

    I already wrote about the problem of the “overjustification effect” when it comes to exploring games back in Into the Black. There’s a problem with giving everything a real “point”. Who knows what the author was planning with those wasteland structures? Does it matter?

    Generally, Mercenary’s city only serves to obfuscate the few elevators dotted around it, although I kept searching for secrets in it – maybe I could enter a building if I tried hard enough? However – the entire City does have one critical mechanic-imbued purpose – which is interesting in the sense that it doesn’t destroy exploration. I’ll expand on that in the next part.

  6. Your attack on Targ reminds me of Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco:

    Mankind sends a one way expedition to a far away planet they have calculated will have life on it. But when they get there the inhabitants are unresponsive. They resort to violence to get their answers – the outcome is alluded in the title.

  7. Joel have you run across ‘Hunter’ in your travels? It was the first open-world game I remember – came out for the Amiga in ’91 and had an impressive array of different vehicles and quite a large set of islands to hop between. Less impressive in terms of NPCs if you were bothering to try to follow the story, but I mostly just tried not to crash the (very tricky to control) helicopter, or windsurfed around looking for sharks…

  8. @st33d: Oh boy, I should be reading more. Maybe I should also read Stanisław Lem’s Solaris…

    @BonusWavePilot: Hunter was mentioned to me over Twitter as a potential late cousin of Mercenary. It sounded interesting – although I noted that it fell into line with videogames slow descent into killing-as-common-denominator stuff as the decades rolled on. (Not to denigrate the game, but it was surprising that Mercenary and it’s two sequels did not put violence front and centre.)

  9. Yay! Do go on.

    Oh, in response to above comments I’d say that one of the lovely things about Mercenary (and other games of its generation) are that these things are hand-crafted, not systems.

    A system lets you generate a whole city, continent or whatever, but you aren’t going to get any surprises. Elite’s universe was massive, but pretty bland.

    Mercenary’s buildings and experiences are individual and often provoke a unique response. The Palyar Commander’s Brother-in-Law’s old ship is, as far as I’m aware, the only one you get the chance to buy and the only one you get the opportunity to steal. You never know what consequence you’re going to get from what thing, (eg. Cheese, Cobweb) and there are constant surprises and delights. That most of the things are there as a joke just adds to the fun of discovery.

    Anyway, I’ll shut up and let you get on with it.

  10. Ah, CdrJameson, I was wondering when you would turn up! I’m still figuring out how much detail I want to put in here because at a certain point the game pivots from “learning” into exhausting the world and going through the motions.

    I also think we might wonder at the design of a city knowing a human was behind it versus an algorithm. I think if we saw patterns in an algorithmic city then I’m not sure we feel the same urge to figure out its story.

  11. @Joel – yeah, that’s fair, Hunter did some interesting stuff (19 different vehicles!), but the key point was still blowing things up or killing folks. (There is a bit of minor NPC interaction in terms of very basic ‘conversations’ and some bribery.)

    It did have some unexpected sights though like windmills and a few different types of animals, and killing the animals would cost you money for some reason, so I suppose violence towards animals was discouraged at least…

    Aside from the obvious LP route if you want more info, Amiga Lore has a good helping of info hither:
    http://www.abime.net/articles/view/article/id/2

  12. Hi Avram – as far as I’m aware, no. The business head of Novagen, Bruce Jordan, passed away five years ago and this makes me nervous that we will never get an interview out of Woakes.

  13. Thanks Joel. Encounter! is a great game yet I never owned a copy of Mercenary. I’d love to eventually hear Paul Woakes’ take on his software development.

  14. Walton monument is a kind of a in-game credit to Gary Walton, Paul’s friend who helped him with calculations for polygons and such. Gary wanted no written credit, so Paul decided to make him a different credit.

  15. Marko, sorry for the late response! I’ve been throwing most of my time into the film I’ve been making about The Witness. I do remember reading something about that. I think there were quite a few landmark names that had a meaning to the team, if no one else…? Jordan Airport was named after (the now late) co-founder Bruce Jordan?

  16. Oh, I’ve heard alot, but never tried Mercenary, but now I clearly see, what I have missed. This kind of open world, with minimalistic graphics (in case of Mercenary rather due to video game epoche) inspires and motivates imagination. Here every dot is filled with history, with backgrounds we as player put in it. (Sidenote: I spend amounts of time looking holes into backgrounds in Deus Ex (Original) – distant Megapolis full of city lights, phantasizing fates and lifes behind every light of these skyscrappers. I just stand around and stared to the inaccessible [without a cheat].).

    I have to check out this gem!

  17. Merzmensch,

    Good luck. I think Mercenary remains fun, for those who are looking for an exploration-led and slower form of game.

    I hope to have a go at its sequels at some point.

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