Citadel

Development

• Developing the game took about a year; it was slowed down by the fact that the developers (all four of them) were all teenage school students.

• According to composer Artur Opala: "While Citadel was being finished, I watched a TV programme about the Electronic Arts team, who were working on a new game in Paris. When I had heard that, for them, a single game involves a year of work of over 300 people, I thought I'd misheard something. Only then I realized what exactly we had done." [source: ppa.pl]

• The levels have been designed by all the developers.

• The music was composed initially on an Amiga 500 and then Amiga 1200 with the Blizzard accelerator, with a simple sampler and the ProTracker program.

• The voices in the intro are by all the developers, as well as a teenage girl named Monika (nicknamed "Drzazga").

• The game has been designed to run on an Amiga 500, which was the most popular Amiga model in Poland back then. As a result of memory constraints, there is no in-game music. The sound effects (the beeps of letters typed into a terminal) in the introduction are actually part of the music; they work properly only on an Amiga 500, but go out of sync on Amiga 1200.

• There was a possibility of the game being published by Seven Stars Multimedia, but eventually the developers settled on Arrakis Software.

Origins

The game concept was created when the programmer, Paweł Matusz, decided to try and create a working Doom-lookalike on the Amiga, despite general consensus being that this sort of game is impossible on this computer. A successful prototype was created a few weeks later (with graphics by Radek Czeczotka); Virtual Design was formed soon afterward to develop the game into something for commercial release.

Release

While the game had good sales in Great Britain, Germany, France and Poland, the developers had a lot of problems with getting their due from the publisher, Arrakis Software and were forced to sue. The legal battle raised some minor interest in Poland, even among mainstream media. While Virtual Design had won, the publisher didn't have the money to pay them and went bankrupt. Virtual Design employees had received very few, if any, financial profits and the company folded soon afterward.

Since then (according to Artur Opala) the game, as well as its code, is officially free to distribute.

Remonstered

On 27th of March 2022 authors released an updated version of the game called "Remonstered". It was added as a bonus to the release of The A500 Mini console. A new version is significantly improved in terms of performance, graphics and level design as well as controls and elimination of some bugs. It can be download directly from Retro Games Ltd website.

Awards

• Świat Gier Komputerowych
  • January 1996 - Golden Disk'95 editors' award for the best Polish game of 1995
  • January 1996 - Hitek'95 readers' award for the best Polish game of 1995