Magic Systems

Next Space carries a single signature: Magic Systems. At the start of the game the name rises out of the darkness in fiery letters, and at the end it appears in the credits with the note ”© 1997”. The game files say nothing more about the studio. The story behind it is told by Peter Hegyi, one of the founders.

How it began

As Peter Hegyi recalls, Magic Systems was founded by Roman Macko, Michal Hegyi and Peter Hegyi. Next Space was the studio’s first product, and it took more than four years to make: work began around 1993 to 1994, and the game came out in the summer of 1997. It was purely a student project, run by enthusiasts on a minimal budget. It was started by Roman Macko, an Amiga enthusiast, together with Michal Hegyi and Ján Šicko. Then Peter Hegyi joined, and eventually others.

At first the game was also intended for the Amiga, and a large part of the 3D animation was rendered on it: Roman Macko made his animations in Imagine on a Commodore Amiga, while Kornel Kabele used 3D Studio MAX (see How the Graphics Were Made). Development gradually moved to the PC.

Who did what in the team:

• Peter Hegyi organised the team, looked for sponsors, animated the characters and did 2D animation, and contributed to the story.
• Michal Hegyi wrote the entire core of the game – the engine.
• Michal Weis and Michal Horka wrote various routines. These included the video player, written at machine-code level, which could play animations from the CD at 20 frames per second (see What Was Unique).
• Roman Macko played Frank, designed the game, and did 3D and 2D animation.

The publisher and the final stretch

In the final phase of development, Juraj Hegyi and his company MAXTECH helped substantially with funding and the final production. As Peter Hegyi recalls, he was enthusiastic and glad to help get the game published. The same Juraj Hegyi is also among the voice actors in the credits of the Slovak version. The credits read “Production: MAXTECH s.r.o. & MAGIC SYSTEMS” and “Game developed by MAGIC SYSTEMS © 1997”.

The Slovak CD dates from June 1997, the Czech one from September 1997 (according to the dates of the NEXT.DAT program file, the Slovak version is from 28 June and the Czech one from 17 September). In July 1997, Level magazine expected the Slovak and Czech releases around the middle of that month. In the meantime, the authors were fixing the game (see Technology in 1997). The authors write: “The game was released on the Slovak and Czech markets in the summer of 1997.”

Where they worked

Mostly at Roman Macko’s home, Peter Hegyi recalls, and later at Trnavská 84 in Bratislava, which is also the studio’s 1997 address.

Reception and sales

The game sold around 1,000 copies. According to an advert in Riki magazine, its recommended retail price in the shops was 799 Sk (Sk = Slovak koruna).

Contemporary magazines reviewed it favourably:

• Level 30 (July 1997, Jakub Tureček): 7/10. The reviewer particularly praises the spaceship fly-bys and the music: they are so convincing that he would believe they had been filmed in a real setting. In his view, the animations overshadow the minor flaws in the graphics.
• Riki 28 (August 1997, Gizmo): 79%. Graphics 92, animation 85, music 75, sound effects 60, fun 78. The reviewer praises the hand-drawn graphics, the digitised actors, the animations and the witty one-liners. The weaker points, in his view, are the story and the clicking, which gets monotonous at times.
• Score 47 (November 1997, Tomáš Varoščák): 7/10. He appreciates the humour and the pleasant music. He finds the technical side weaker, especially the 256-colour SVGA graphics, but calls the animations “amazing”.
• Level 23 (December 1996) had already written about the game as a forthcoming title.

A small curiosity from the Riki review: it calls the hero Frank Zitto. That surname never appears in the game itself.

After Next Space

The studio remained independent and active until 2002. It operated on both the Slovak and the international scene and grew to more than 20 developers. It specialised in Flash animation, websites and simple Flash games. One of its most significant works was www.flashfun.sk and www.flashfun.cz, a large interactive channel for its time.

Contact details from 1997

The file PROBLEMY.TXT on both CDs gives the studio’s address: MAGIC SYSTEMS, Trnavská 84, 821 02 Bratislava, the e-mail address magics@gtinet.sk and the website www.gratex.sk/magic. The studio was not part of Gratex: the gratex.sk address was used only for web hosting and as a contact point. Magic Systems was independent.

MAGIC SYSTEMS Trnavská 84 821 02 Bratislava e-mail: magics@gtinet.sk http://www.gratex.sk/magic

The text ends with the words: “We hope you manage to resolve all the problems. Yours faithfully, MAGIC SYSTEMS.” (The original is in Slovak, without diacritics.)

PROBLEMY.TXT is also a small relic of its time. It explains how to find the sound card settings in Windows 95 so that the game can be configured correctly. It also admits to a bug that freezes the controls in some rooms, and promises “a patch soon”.

The team in the credits

The game’s credits (the DATA/2.FLC file) list 22 people in the Slovak version (16 in the Czech one, where the “Voices” card is missing). Some names appear more than once: many people did several jobs at once.

Acknowledgements (Special thanks to): studio L-TEAM, European Peripherals s.r.o., HELDIS, Erich Pápay, Martin Grečner, studio SYZ, Interline s.r.o., Ing. Martinický, Peter Velčovský “and others…”.

According to Peter Hegyi, the Juraj Hegyi listed under Voices is the same person as the owner of the publisher, MAXTECH (see above).

The Characters page covers who played which character, and How the Graphics Were Made who did what on the graphics.

What they left behind

According to the authors, Next Space was the studio’s first project. Yet it contains several things rarely seen in games of the 1990s: its own video codec, its own scripting language, and digitised actors whom someone cut out frame by frame. There is more on the What Was Unique page.

Almost thirty years on, the game can be run in an ordinary web browser. The data the studio created could be read and understood in full, so the game can run from its original files (see Play Online).