Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold

Trivia

On January 1, 1995, Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold was put on the infamous German index by the BPjS for being extreme violent.

Note: Indexed products by the BPjS/BPjM are illegal to sell or make available to minors in Germany and it is illegal to advertise for it in any form. But there is absolutely no law forbidding any adult to buy such a product. The only exception is when a game was in addition also confiscated (or put on the so-called "List B" for BPjM games), but this is rather seldom the case.

In this particularly case here, Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold was just indexed, but not confiscated.

However, due to the fact that advertisement also means the presence of a product on the shelves of a store, the product will disappear from the public. But it can be bought in supporting stores "under the desk" (per request).

BPjS/BPjM = German Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften/Medien = Federal Examination Office for Youth-Endangering Publications/Media.

Did you know that the programmers that developed Blake Stone (JAM Productions) were friends of ID Software from when both teams worked at Softdisk Publishing as employees. JAM Productions was aware DOOM was going to be released and that it would kill all sales of Blake Stone, so the game was released early with shotty graphics and sounds, 1 month before DOOM to hopefully see some sales. The first 30 days of sales brought in a good $100,000 for the development team. Once DOOM was released all income dropped to below $10,000 a month. The company strugled to release "Planet Strike" then later the company broke up.

Blake Stone came out earlier than DOOM (7 days earlier, to be exact), but was totally blown away when DOOM hit. Looks like people weren't too taken by the slow, outdated engine and sub-par gameplay Blake Stone offered, when DOOM offered pure, driving action...what the people want!

The original documentation for the game included an 11 page comic book which introduced Blake and his arch-enemy, Doctor Goldstern.

Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold version 1.0 was first released on December 3rd 1993.

While Blake Stone uses an updated version of the Wolfenstein 3D engine, it is not the significantly upgraded engine that appeared in Shadowcaster.

Contributed by Trixter (8865) on Jan 24, 2000.