![]() But none of that happened, because halfway through walking the dog, Death came knocking and I got smashed to pulp.īut that’s another story. Then it would be lunchtime and the celebrations could begin. I would then sign some personalised Deus posters, hot off the press from the same printer who’d produced the originals 30 years before. After breakfast, I would hit the button for the game’s release to my backers, supporters, and early adopters. I trotted off for a seaside dog walk before breakfast. The morning of my birthday was beautiful. But from that moment on, I thought there was a chance of not only bringing Deus Ex Machina to market again, but making a success of it this time around.ĭeus Ex Machina 2 was scheduled for release on 19 November 2013, my 65th birthday, the day society would officially recognise me by awarding me my Old Age Pension. Blimey! Christopher Lee, a still-living legend, had just agreed to work with Mel Croucher, a chancer with a silly moustache. “I’ll do it,” he growled, in a godly sort of way. It was, in fact, an invitation to shake on it. Making it amusing!” He sniffed, stroked his silver beard, then waved a hand in what I thought was a gesture of dismissal. “There will be those who will be appalled. “This is a travesty!” The voice was magnificent. When I met him for the first time, after weeks of wooing by old-fashioned pen and ink, Christopher Lee turned out to be very tall, very frail, and very frank. Scaramanga in The Man With The Golden Gun, Count Dooku in Star Wars, and Saruman in The Lord of the Rings (that’s Christopher Lee) with Mel Croucher. Obviously, my first step was to check out if he was still undead. So I set about hiring the services of the voice of Dracula: the greatest set of vocal pipes on the planet, Sir Christopher Lee. ![]() I needed a voice that would be recognised anywhere in the world as the nearest thing to The Voice Of God. ![]() This time around I wanted to start the player off in awe and leave them in tears. The original narration as recorded by Jon Pertwee had been warm and encouraging. The new gameplay was my usual mix of the basic four elements of all video games: chess, ping-pong, dice, and bullshit. Something called ‘crowdfunding’ was taking off, and I thought I’d give it a go. Tuesday evening, after tea and compulsory prayers, the entire Portuguese economy went tits-up. Now, with oodles of megabytes to play with, the Portuguese economy behind me, and the pick of Europrogrammers to choose from, I reckoned on producing the greatest video game in the history of video games since the last time I did it, for release in 2012. The original version of Deus Ex Machina had taken me ten weeks to deliver in 96 kilobytes for the cost of a garden shed. The company he’d created to produce the game was the delightfully named Quirkafleeg, named in honour of Room 40 in Matthew Smith’s bonkers vintage game, Jet Set Willy. Who was I to step on that dream? He flew to London and we met on Valentine’s Day to seal the deal. ![]() It was time to call Mário Francisco Valente Baltazar Valente (like New York, New York, so good they named him twice), the Portuguese entrepreneur who had a bank in his pocket and a declaration that it had been his lifelong dream to remake Deus Ex Machina. And the inevitable new wave of bootleg products began to infest the online shopping malls, all featuring key graphics and audio from the original game. Deus Ex Machina appeared on the first page of the definitive history of video games. It turned out that pirate editions had made the charts in countries I can’t even spell, and bootleg copies had percolated through the university networks of the civilised world, which means I never really made it in the USA. The more I dug into the web, the more bodies came up, and the full truth of what had happened began to emerge. Mário’s proposals were put on ice, along with all the others.ĭeus Ex Machina’s 25th anniversary triggered a spate of interest, and my game started to pop up all over the place. Here in the UK, the entire financial system teetered on the brink, and it really didn’t seem like a good time to be taking a punt on a new venture. ![]() Then, one month after I received his email, the American bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. If I was going to remake the game, then harnessing the money of one of the sods who had pirated it in the first place would be satisfying. The licensing deal he offered was not unattractive, and I was not saying no. His name was Mário, an Iberian ex-rocker who’d ended up working as Chief Information Officer at the Portuguese Ministry of Justice, with his waist-length hair and ponytail still intact. It came from a self-confessed pirate of my original game, who said he wanted to atone for his crimes and pay me back for setting him off in the business world while he was still a student. But there was one proposal which was a little different from the rest. ![]()
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