Dragon’s Kingdom: history and playable demo download (case closed)

Introduction:



Dragon’s Kingdom (http://hol.abime.net/?id=4841) was an action game for Amiga 500 that had to be produced in 1990 by the small Italian software house Genias. Genias planned both a C64 and an Amiga version of the game. The C64 version (a sort of Ghost’n Goblins clone) was published in late 1998, the Amiga version (a game more similar to StormLord or The Shadow of the Beast) was cancelled in 1990, after over two years of work. C64 and Amiga versions was developed by two different teams. Golden Team was in charge of Amiga version.



These are the members of Golden Team (so you can update the HOL’s Dragon’s Kingdom page):

Coder: Francesco Martire, Massimiliano Agostinelli

Graphician: Fabio Rossi

Musician: Nicola Tomljanovich ( Black Viper, Fighting Spirit, Top Wrestling, F17 and many others)



History:

Officially Genias cancelled the Amiga version of Dragon’s Kingdom cause Golden Team didn’t finish the coding of the game after over two years of work.

Recently the Italian site Retrogaming.it published an interview with Francesco Martire, main coder of the game (http://www.retrogaming.it/ ). In that interview Francesco explains the real causes of game’s cancellation and reveals the unprofessional behaviour of Genias.

From the interview:

“… I was working on an Amiga 500 without hard-drive, the game itself took all the ram avaible, even the ram concerning the Shadow KickStart, so I had to reset system after each debugging session. […] …in other worlds I had to wait about ten minutes of software loading before starting every Dragon’s Kingdom session.”

“… we where passionate and talented but not experienced, and Genias didn’t support us at all. […] They (Genias) appeared not interested in how the coding of Dragon’s Kingdom was going, I remember that we met the producers at least three times in over two years…”

“…I studied by myself several game-coding manuals during school lessons […] …but soon I realized that I had to repeat the fourth year of Lyceum (Italian High School) for the third time. The coding of the game was taking all my time and my parents asked me to make a choice: continue studies or become a professional game-coder. I decided to resume studies… […] I didn’t call Genias to inform the producers that I have stopped coding Dragon’s Kingdom and they never called to ask me anything about how game’s developing was going on… everything finished in this way.”



So even if bitmap graphics and game music was finished, the coding of the game was very very far for completion. The only DK’s playable thing is a one level demo downloadable from the game’s site.

http://www.angelfire.com/ok/lacerta/dk/dkingdom.html




The Demo:

Game’s demo is playable with WinUAE, you have to configure UAE with an A500 standard configuration and KickStart 1.3 (the demo doesn’t work with Kickstart 2.0).

It’s sad that the game is unfinished cause it displays some good graphics and a quite addictive gameplay.

In DK’s site there are also several game’s screenshot and production sketches that could be helpful for the HOL’s Dragon’s Kingdom page.




Notes:

-Please ask to the webmaster of Restrogaming.it the permission to translate and publish the full Francesco Martire’s interview if you are interested to include it in the AGTW website.


-Sorry for my bad English