Today I want to share something very special with the world that I got my hands on a while ago. Introducing: Monsterized! – an almost completely finished point & click adventure game that never saw the light of day. But how is that even possible? We have to go back in time more than two decades to answer this:
Sunflowers Interactive Entertainment Software GmbH was without doubt one of the most influential video game producers in Germany in the late 90s and early 2000s. They had their first real breakthrough into the market with Fugger II (1996) and Anno 1602 (1998) – an absolute classic among the games that were produced in Germany. An article from the german gaming magazine PC Games (Issue No.38 11/95) reported on Sunflowers very large publishing plans at the time, including many unreleased titles about which hardly anything is known about to this day. One of these titles: Monsterized! – a point & click adventure game scheduled for release in November 1995.
A one-page special on the game shows the new point & click adventure for the first time with lots of information on the developer, the storyline and a few pictures to go along with it. I’ll let the article speak for itself:
Will LucasArts and Sierra have to dress warmly? Sunflowers will release the Windows adventure game Monsterized!, developed by the newly founded label InNoSense, before Christmas.
The title Monsterized! already gives a rough indication of the content: Main character Jeff Boxx hires himself out as a roaming plush monster in an amusement park haunted castle that serves as a venue for live role-playing games. By a stupid coincidence, a magician (the original owner of the castle) is beamed back to the present and curses the entire park out of anger at the commercialization of his property. Jeff’s task is now to restore the original conditions – which will not prove to be easy. This story was the brainchild of project manager and founder of InNoSense Entertainment, Carsten Kisslat. His team consists of a total of eight young employees, whom he has brought together from all corners of Germany. The concept for Monsterized! lay dormant in Kisslat’s drawers for years before Sunflowers became aware of it and pushed the project through to market maturity. The fact that this is not one of the usual in-three-hours-youre-done adventures is proven by the script and the dialogue book alone, which each comprise several hundred pages.
Monsterized! was created with the help of a development system by programmer Arndt Hasch and was written explicitly for Windows 3.1, but will also be usable under Windows 95. The magnificent SVGA background graphics were created by InNoSense artist Jürgen Lacher: After the individual illustrations were created as pencil sketches, he painted all 50 backdrops with an airbrush, acrylic paints and colored pencils, scanned them in and reworked them. The graphic design team (Tobias Franz, Oliver Richter, Klaus Hoffmeister and Uwe Schurig) is responsible for animating the 30 different characters and designing the user interface and icons. Musician Theo Hoffmann arranged 17 lively soundtracks in a wide variety of styles to match the respective locations.
Two “old hands” are taking care of the voice output: Ralf Adam and Alexander Röder have already proven themselves in the translation and dubbing of the Simon the Sorcerer adventures and will also give Monsterized! an above-average density of gags. If all goes well, the game will be available in November 1995 after the intensive test phase.
Unfortunately, as it turned out, nothing was ever heard about the project again after this article. For a while you could still find the title in release lists, but at some point it disappeared from there too. The game was quietly buried and what exactly was behind it remained a mystery… until today.
Through a very lucky coincidence, I was given the data from this literally ancient relic:
After a brief inspection of the data, I was astonished to discover that this must be one of the last development versions of the game, if not the last version in existence. And interestingly enough: The version was created on 29/12/1995, i.e. after the game had missed its actual release target by a month.
After a few attempts to get the game running, I quickly realized (admittedly not thrilled) that it will only run properly natively on Windows 95. After I was able to set up Windows 95 on a virtual machine and copied the game files over, I tried to run it and… nothing happened! After a closer look at the data and a hex editor, I realized that I would have to install the game via CD. So I set out to create a CD image from the data and then tried to install it via the setup – unfortunately that didn’t work either, as the installation was always aborted by an error. About 8 hours later, however, I managed to complete the installation correctly by hand (by reading the setup file with the Hex Editor) and so I clicked on the game to start it…
… I couldn’t believe it myself. The game was finally running and probably for the first time in over 20 years! It even had a completely professional voice over for every dialogue – it almost seemed like a finished game. After very, very long sessions trying to decipher all the puzzles in the game (and honestly a lot of fun, especially with the charming dialog) I was able to discover by far the most exciting fact about this version… it’s an almost completely finished game. The targeted release date from Sunflowers suddenly no longer seemed like the usual big promises from publishers at the time. I was able to play the game from start to finish with only a few bugs or slightly unfinished (and buggy) parts. Through some more digging through the data, I also found scraps of a fully voiced demo version of the game that was never released. Not only was the game almost finished, but a demo had most likely already been prepared.
Now one question in particular was burning on my tongue: How can it be that a game that was almost finished – simply remained unreleased?
After some research, I managed to contact three of the developers involved at the time and they were able to clarify what happened to the project. Apparently, the project was canceled due to a long delay in programming and technical issues and so at some point the publisher, Sunflowers, became impatient and canceled the project. The fact that the plug was pulled this close to the finish line, is a very bitter pill to swallow. One of the developers working on the project at the time also revealed a very interesting detail about the development process:
“Incidentally, we produced the game 100% remotely back then. That was still in the pre-Internet age without email or FTP. At the beginning, many assets were sent on floppy disks through Germany by post. Then we bought all the modems. Bug reports were sent by faxes tens of meters long.”
And so we reach the end of my article, if you are now interested in playing the game, you can! In the two following links I provide the virtual machine on which the game has already been set up to run, as well as the untouched game data. However, English readers be warned, the game is only available in german.
In order to really bring the game closer to everyone, I have recorded a video in which the complete game is presented (sadly I couldn’t find the time to make an english translation – maybe in the future!). I also included an important missing dialog from the data in the video. For all people who try to play through the game themselves, you can also watch the video as a kind of “guide”.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to read the article to the end, until next time!
