I also did a new segment about the status of the project for the virtual CAX that was broadcast yesterday on Twitch. You may or may not know that we have had a couple of presentations about the project at the last two California Extreme events. Jess, Bryan Roth and others helping him under the watchful eye of our "benevolent overlord" Owen Rubin have been working hard on the Level Editor as well as adding to and modifying the original game code to help realize all the great ideas that got left on the design table back in the 1980's. At some point after I had started to crank out working levels Jess jokingly told me that I had already won the contest basically and the rest is still being made history.Ĭurrently we have added back three of the Return to Vax levels Jess made and I have had the honor and great fortune of being allowed to create nine more new levels bringing it up total total of 28 for The Promised End (5 new "regular" levels and 4 hidden ones featuring the new Maxoid enemy that never got implemented into the original game). The original plan was to have a contest after the level editor was finished and then he and Owen would pick the best ones to put in the final game. Jess asked if I would be interested in helping them test it out and to see if I could come up with some cool levels. He let me know that they really wanted to complete Owen's vision for the final game, with his help no less, that had been cut short when Atari rushed the game out in the middle of the arcade crash. At some point in early 2018 Jess told me about the MH Level Editor that he was working on with Bryan Roth and others. I was working on setting high scores on both the original MH and Return to Vax (in MAME) so I kept sending Jess and Owen playback vids of my efforts. I think they first hacked arcade roms to get tons of lives to see if they could find the home world and that many years later led to the creation of new levels by figuring out how the game stored them so they could make changes in a hex editor to build new ones. He had been hacking Major Havoc and interested in the home world since the 80's with friends like Bryan Roth and others. That was the one and only Owen Rubin the designer of Major Havoc and many other great classic titles.Īround the same time I had reached out to Jess Askey who had put together the Return to Vax rom hack with some cool new levels for Major Havoc. I was starting to set high scores and even WR's on some titles as I started to attend California Extreme here in the Bay Area where I happened to be showing off on Major Havoc one day as someone came up behind me and said "You're pretty good at my game". My friends and I were obsessed with Major Havoc's multi genre gaming madness thinking there would be many more games like it that never came to be after the arcade scene crashed and burned.ĭecades later I got back into classic arcade gaming again through MAME and meeting like minded friends who owned original cabs and threw arcade parties every now and then. Like many others I spent a great deal of time looking for that "home world" in Major Havoc when I was a kid in the 80's.
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