Thank you all!
Hi
I'm so delighted to read all of your messages.
I never thought people would be playing this game and enjoying it nearly 20 years after it was developed, and it gives me a great joy and pride.
Let me share with you some of the history of this game:
"Avish" was developed by 4 teenagers from Israel:
Dvir Besserglick
Gonen Dukas
Amir Kaminsky
and myself, Amit Amely
The game was developed in Pascal (Borland, if I remember well), with some parts in assembler.
Dvir and Gonen did most of the programming, with some help from Amir.
Dvir designed the main character.
Amir wrote the music and designed most of the levels.
I was responsible for graphics and animation (using a pirated version of AutoDesk Animator Pro), and also designed some levels (I don't remember today which ones. The snail level is mine for sure).
The game concept was the work of all of us together.
We worked on this game during our last year of high school, back in 1992
We did it for fun, not thinking about money.
Avish's character is based on a real person, our history teacher Avishay. He was very dry, strict and humorless, but since he was so absent minded, he managed to gain a cult status and that inspired us to base a computer game on his character. The voice of the Avish is Dvir, making a pretty accurate imitation of Avishay.
After we have finished the game and saw that it was actually pretty cool, we decided to try to make some money out of it. High school was over, I got drafted to the army and wasn't involved in the negotiations with the different computer companies. Eventually they signed a contract with "Bug Multisystem" for 15% of the profits. The game had two versions, Hebrew and English. Bug decided to market the game only in Israel, in the Hebrew version. My friends also had the pleasure of being hosted on a TV show about computers, and talk about the game. The game wasn't a big success, and pretty soon it was moved from the shelves to the cutout bins. It was also given as a prize in a TV computer game show called "Hugo". 2 or 3 years later, each one of us got a 100$ check for the game.
Years have passed. I finished my military service, and went to University to learn computer science. The others did things in the opposite order, and started their military service only then, after finishing their studies. The game was forgotten. One day I found the abandonware site "Home Of The Underdogz". I really liked the idea of sharing old games which are no longer available in the stores for free, and after I discussed it with Dvir, I decided to upload our game to HOTU. So I sent the website author the non released English version (which was also fixed by Dvir to work on Pentium machines). And the rest is history...
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