We've all heard this kind of old sailor story before: How a ship was caught on flat sea,
with no clouds and no wind at all, and the ship couldn't move, sometimes for days.
There's probably a proper navy term for that situation, but I'm too lazy to surf the net
to look for it. I'm sure you get the idea anyway.
These last couple of months, Opcode Games has been caught on flat sea, with the crew
still willing to move forward, but with no wind in its sails. The reason for it is mainly
Eduardo's illness. I don't want to get into details with respect to Eduardo's privacy,
but I can tell you that it started last May, and even today, the doctors still aren't
sure what's wrong with him. This illness, whatever it is, has taken its toll on our
friend Eduardo, and at a certain point, not only did he lose interest in anything related
to Opcode Games, he also stopped answering e-mail, even mine! The guy had never faced
this kind of uncertainty about his health before, and while I wouldn't label it as
depression, it did drain his motivation away for several weeks.
Eduardo is feeling better now, and he has made some recent progress with Road Fighter,
but since he's not completely out of the woods, we've decided to revise all our project
deadlines, or more precisely, to remove them all: If you look at our current projects on
this web site, you'll notice that the release dates for Pac-Man Collection, Road Fighter
and Konami Sports Collection have been replaced with a simple "TBA" notice (the other
games were already marked this way before).
From now on, we will not even try to set a release time frame for our games. Our games
will be released when they're ready, and they'll be ready when Eduardo decides they're
ready. There's a very good chance Road Fighter will be released before the end of this
year, but beyond that, no promises can be made.
Eduardo will be working on and off on his ColecoVision projects over the next year or so.
In terms of sequence, our game plan will remain mostly the same, meaning that after Road
Fighter, Eduardo will concentrate his efforts on Pac-Man Collection. Beyond those two
games, things get a little blurry. Do we make Konami Sport Collection our next priority,
or do we focus on the Memory Pack and its games (Goonies, Knightmare, etc.)? One thing is
for sure: The Opgrade Module is now a very, VERY long-term project.
As for me, I'm forced to re-evaluate my position as executive producer of Opcode Games.
The whole idea of bringing me onboard was to streamline the release schedule so that
Eduardo could release more than one game per year. Considering that this year has been
completely devoid of any Opcode releases (so far anyway) and that Eduardo has decided to
take his time with current and future projects, what am I still doing here, besides
writing blog entries to explain why our games keep getting pushed back again and again?
It's not Eduardo's fault, he didn't ask to get sick, and he didn't expect Pac-Man
Collection to be such a headache-inducing hassle, but still, I tend to believe the
universe is sending me a message which I shouldn't ignore. If staying here makes no
sense, I should move on. We'll see how things evolve over the next few months...
Oh, one last thing: We've received several orders for Ping-Pong lately, and I think a
clarification is in order: PING-PONG IS NOT FOR SALE!! Eduardo made a few
Ping-Pong carts for his close friends a few years ago, and no other carts have been
produced since. This same game of Ping-Pong will be included in "Konami Sports
Collection", so you'll have to wait for it. Don't bother trying to get us to make you
a special copy of the stand-alone Ping-Pong game, we're not willing to do it for anyone.
