Fun with Design

 

Thursday, August 20, 1998 - More on Herzog Zwei

A long time reader, Sang Woo Han, from Korea, wrote me with all kinds of good poop about Herzog Zwei, which I erroneously called Herzog's Zwei in a previous column about real time strategy games.

With Sang's permission, I'm reprinting his two e-mails, slightly edited and formatted for your consumption.

Here's what he said:

"Hello Dr. Clarke-Willson,

"I enjoyed reading your recent update regarding the advent of RTS games. I have searched on Altavista, and the name of the game that was mentioned in your article is 'Herzog Zwei' (these exact words results in 254 matches, so I guess your previous attempt at trying to find information on this game was foiled by the addition of the apostrophe and 's') by TechnoSoft of Japan. It seems that there are quite a number of people who recognize the significance of this game providing some interesting information on the net.

"It's funny though. TechnoSoft is mostly famous here in Korea and Japan for their 'ThunderForce' side-scrolling shooter series than any other game that they made. Also, they never made another game even similar to it. Most of their efforts went into creating MegaDrive (Sega Genesis) games that were quite good for their time, but after that, after the Saturn came out, they, sort of, went silently "under". Hmm...makes one wonder if Herzog Zwei wasn't just a fluke on TechnoSoft's part.

"TechnoSoft is still making games nowadays, but their most recent releases were 'ThunderForce(TF)' anthologies for the Saturn(some of which I have played), which basically turned the Saturn into a Genesis emulator(plus some newly arranged music and some rendered FMV). There was also a 'ThunderForce V' for the Saturn, but I only know of its existence, and haven't actually seen it. TechnoSoft is famous in Japan for making games that cater to the 'hardcore' shooting game audience. Their shooting games were never easy, and required very finely tuned reflexes.

"Another interesting aspect of TechnoSoft is that they have a rather large following in Japan in their music. The world's first game music soundtrack was released in Japan something like 18~19 years ago. Game music is a pretty lucrative merchandizing market for software companies wanting to get the most out of their products. TechnoSoft's games had a distinctive musical quality that seemed to appeal to quite a crowd, but they didn't release their soundtrack CDs like all the other Japanese companies(companies such as Konami, Taito, Sega, and Falcom). Instead, if people wanted to purchase TechnoSoft's soundtracks, they had to fill out a form that was included in TechnoSoft's games and send it in. Only then could one become eligible to purchase their CDs. So if you wanted to buy the soundtrack CD for, say, TF3, you had to first buy the game, then fill out the form, send it in, get further information, _pay_ the price of the CD, then get it sent to you.

"I don't know if they sold many CDs, but by employing this method, only TechnoSoft knew about the number of CDs sold(the numbers of CDs sold in stores can usually be obtained through various means). I tried getting some of these CDs myself, but was always unsuccessful. The popularity of the TF series for the Genesis and offering CDs in such a shrewd way, they somehow propelled sort of an overall image of being a hard-core game-oriented company, which seemed to appeal to a large number of the, then nascent, 'otaku' population.

"As is common with all the musical compositions of previous generation consoles, TechnoSoft's music was good on the FM-synthesis sounds of the Genesis, but as soon the storage media changed to CD and game companies switched to RedBook audio, the same music didn't sound so good anymore. In someway, I attribute the current state of TechnoSoft to the fact that they never really seemed to have caught on the CD-ROM and 3D trend of gaming.

"Until next time,

With best regards,

Sang Woo Han"

So I did the search and discovered Herzog Zwei (I wonder what that means?) has a very small but serious cult following. There are a couple of guys who are reimplementing the entire game themselves (check this out).

Once I looked at the screenshots for Herzog Zwei I thought - hey, that looks like Total Annihilation! And the little motorcycles look like Dune buggies.

Another reader, Gregg Tavares, sent me the name of a game that was the first real time strategy game he'd ever seen, and Gregg's been playing games since before the Big Crash (the Atari crash - you know). Here's what Gregg said:

"Just FYI: The first real time stratagy game with smooth graphics (verses one with jerky graphics) that I played was on the Atari 800 in probably 1982. I believe it was by SSI. It featured a scrolling map (though it only scrolled vertically) and several types of units like tanks and troops and jeeps that smoothly drove/walked around the map and blew each other up.

"Most of the stratagy games at that time were visibly grid based."

I would encourage everyone to do the search for "Herzog Zwei" on Altavista and then give those guys doing the modern version of the game (which they cleverly call "HZ") some encouragement. It's got serious potential - especially if they can exploit the special lineage started by the original game.

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