OsWALD

The player controls OsWALD, a blue teddy bear with a bow tie who has accidentally ended up at the North Pole, and must traverse a single straight path over the sea to the finish line, jumping from one floating ice floe to another without falling into the water. OsWALD is seen from a top-down vertical scrolling perspective. The rounded floes arrive arranged in three rows and flowing at different speeds. The player can only give the command to jump towards a nearby floe, to the right or left (with automatic diagonal direction if necessary), or forward. In the television version of the game, keys 4, 6 and 8 on the telephone were used. In addition to jumping into the water, the player can lose a life if they slide to the edge of the screen or touch one of the enemies. Red whales pass along with the ice floes, which the player can normally use to jump over, but if they stay on top of a whale for too long, OsWALD will be sent flying by the whale's blowhole and lose a life. Other enemies include strange screeching birds that fly towards OsWALD and will fight with him, and Herbie, a Greenlandic recluse and Inuk hunter who arrives on a floe and can jump onto the one in front, freezing OsWALD if he touches him. Some floes have gift packages that the player can collect as bonuses. The Super OsWALD version has a multiplayer mode that allows two players to play simultaneously, while the appearance and general functions of the title screen are left unchanged. The second character introduced in the game is OsWALDLine, a white female teddy bear and OsWALD's girlfriend. In the Amiga and Commodore 64 versions, the characters are both present in the game even in single-player mode, at least at the beginning of the game, with one of the bears as a computer-controlled character. The player can also collect a big "S", after which OsWALD or OsWALDLine will transform into a superhero, "Super OsWALD" or "Super OsWALDLine". The transformation also occurs if either player reaches the finish line with 10 packages. This leads to a 40-second bonus level in which OsWALD or OsWALDLine flies above the sea; the player can move left and right and must try to collect huge 100 krone banknotes, with mice riding on them like flying carpets, and avoid bombs. This will take the player to the end of the game if they can complete one final task. ==Development==

In August 1986, Keld Jensen founded the first professional Danish game developing company, Kele Line, in Slangerup. The company later moved to Amager, which helped attract some young talented developers. The company released their first successful games, The Vikings and Tiger Mission, as well as two other games, Cyborg and Zyrons Escape. Their distributor, however, disappeared with all of the profits, which left Keld unable to pay his developers, causing a rift within the company. Ivan Sølvason (b. 1960 to Bjarne Sølvason), an editor for the Commodore 64 and Amiga magazine COMputer (also known as Det Nye COMputer), ran a hit-piece on Kele Line in the magazine. Starvision was an ambitious company at the time, having a branch in New York, releasing their first game M.A.C.H.: Maneuverable Armed Computer Humans, and having several games in development in 1988, including Gigaball, World Atlas, Mega Pinball (later renamed Super Pinball), Twin Ranger, Starfighter One, and Super Elite. The developers quickly got tired of Sølvason's lack of participation in their work, and they had no cash inflow, which left M.A.C.H. as their only game, and Swiss Computer Arts would publish Gigaball (renamed Giganoid) instead. Most of the team left to work in the United States on Sword of Sodan at Discovery Software, leaving Sølvason in Denmark to continue the remaining projects. All of them were members of the Danish Amiga demoscene. Jørgensen came up with the concept of a teddy bear jumping about on blocks of ice and collecting gift packages, as well as a couple of quotes during gameplay with the voice provided by Sølvason, including one when he loses a life, "Det var vel nok ærgerligt. Vi prøver igen!" ("Isn't that just bad. We'll have another try!") It ran on three Amiga 2000s (one used in the studio and two for running the programme) with video output, genlock and an RGB generator. The Amiga system used in the studio was hooked to a specially designed modem that allowed contestants to speak to the host from home, and at the same time send DTMF signals from the telephone keys to play. The modem and communication software were developed by Voice Communication in Holbæk, and Commodore Denmark provided the Amiga hardware, genlock interface and connection to Nordisk Film's studio systems and RGB generators. According to COMputer, broadcasting a telephone-controlled game on live television was a revolutionary idea, which at the time was not even known in the United States. When OsWALD became a hit on Danish television, Hansen, Jørgensen, Balle and Kyd tried to renegotiate their contract with Nordisk Film without involving Sølvason, claiming that he never signed a contract with them. In an interview with COMputer, Sølvason stated that he founded SilverRock Productions in Copenhagen on 12 May 1989, which began operations while continuing the development of OsWALD. Nordisk Film asked for a sequel, and SilverRock agreed to stick with OsWALD, but develop a new updated version of the game named Super OsWALD, with a multiplayer mode. Super OsWALD was SilverRock's first success. It had a widespread release in Denmark through Sølvason's connections to COMputer, and was sold to Nordisk Film for US $10,000.), programmer Thomas Villadsen, and composer and sound designer Jens-Christian Huus. Villadsen knew a programmer named Uffe Jakobsen (who later worked on Hugo), who helped him with some timing and grid routines. In connection with an exhibition at the Copenhagen Post & Tele Museum, Jakobsen made a DTMF-to-joystick adapter for visitors so that they could play OsWALD via a telephone in the same manner as in Eleva2ren. The MS-DOS port was developed by Interchange Software, designed by programmers Boris Jan Bonfils and Bo Bendtsen. ==References==