Vortex Blaster
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My very first video game, "Vortex Blaster" holds a special place of nostalgia in my heart. A vertical scrolling space shoot 'em up (or "shmup"), you control a space ship that constantly drains fuel, has a limited shield, and lasers that overheat. Shooting fuel canisters with your target will gain more fuel, and pausing your shooting will allow your lasers to cool down.
Use either your keyboard controls (arrow keys for movement, Control key for fire), or on original hardware plug in a SG1000/SC3000/MasterSystem compatible control pad or joystick.
Developed by Trident Technological Systems and published by Poseidon Software in 1984.
Developer Tom Theil was kind enough to email me, and tell me a bit about it's creation:
Vortex Blaster (our first release) was developed by myself Tom Thiel and Graham Gaskell under TTS, it was really a very exciting time for us. Graham does network consulting these days, catch up sometimes still on skype with him and we had a yarn or 2 about those days.
For me I missed those days of making games and now am doing a new game https://www.facebook.com/dragonsofbabylon its hard without funding, but getting there. A lot more to do with the graphics these days! I will also recode these old games for web and some for mobile later with a touch of new graphics.
Vortex blaster was made inside of a week poked in using basic to enter the numbers of machine code one at a time.
After that game we wrote a quick editor/assembler to complete other games vermin invaders, etc and released a few in basic as well
The voice was Graham’s so it’s really a Kiwi accent., I wrote a script to record and convert to bin. 0 and 1s and rotated a byte 8 times, then we simply played it back and then I played with it a bit.
We backward engineered the sega pc to work out the mapping as John sands could not get the info out of Sega
Later I went on to do some business software and Graham headed back to NZ after we had released a number of games over 2 years and formed Poseidon and continued the releases of the software we both developed and also published other software.
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