Manfred Trenz

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Manfred Trenz (born November 29, 1965 in Saarbrücken , Germany ) is the developer of the Turrican series of computer games , responsible for the C64 version of the hit R-Type game and the well-known C64 game The Great Giana Sisters . Several of his works are considered cult games within the scene .

Career

In 1984 Manfred Trenz first came into contact with a friend's VC20 and created his own graphics. A short time later he bought a C64 and started developing in BASIC . He quickly realized that the built-in BASIC interpreter of the C64 was not serving his purposes and learned assembler . In addition, he continued to design graphics. In 1986 he took part with some of his pictures in a graphics competition organized by the magazine " 64'er " and came in third.

For Trenz, this competition meant the leap into the world of professional game development, because shortly afterwards the small game company Rainbow Arts contacted him. In 1987 he was finally hired there after initially working as a freelancer for the company.

The Great Giana Sisters

Trenz's first project at Rainbow Arts was The Great Giana Sisters , which was so close to the Super Mario Bros. template that it soon disappeared from the shelves. As a black copy , which was particularly common at the time, the game nevertheless spread and gained great popularity among computer gamers. Trenz was responsible for graphics, game and level design.

Katakis

Inspired by the shoot'em ups Nemesis , Darius and R-Type , Trenz started his second project at Rainbow Arts after the Great Giana Sisters : Katakis , which was published in 1988. Rainbow Arts also faced legal complications in this game. In order to avoid a legal dispute, they agreed with the R-Type publisher Activision that Rainbow Arts should implement R-Type for the C64 - this happened within the short development time of 6½ weeks. In return, Activision decided not to take legal action. Manfred Trenz was also responsible for this implementation.

Turrican

He was also inspired by well-known game titles for Trenz's next game project, this time Metroid and Hawkeye . The latter was developed by the Dutchman Mario Van Zeist and his Boys Without Brains and published by Thalamus . For Trenz it was considered to be the most technically demanding C64 game up until then, which he wanted to top.

In 1990, Rainbow Arts finally released the platform shooter Turrican . Features included eight-way and true parallax scrolling and expansive levels that add up to 1200 screens. In addition to the extensive game depth for the time, the game also has, like Katakis, large intermediate and final bosses , which are composed of several sprites.

Turrican was a great success and has been converted for a number of other systems, including the Amiga by the Factor 5 developer group . In 1991 the successor Turrican II was published. This was also primarily developed for the C64, even if the Amiga version was finished a little earlier. In addition to the tried and tested gameplay from the predecessor, some levels in the style of Katakis are designed as shoot'em up.

After Turrican

Parallel to Super Turrican for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1992, Manfred Trenz developed Enforcer , which was to be his last game on the C64. Although technically impressive too, Enforcer did not achieve the success of Trenz's previous games. One guess as to the cause is based on the fact that it was not published by Rainbow Arts, but by Double Density in a diskette magazine.

In the years that followed, Manfred Trenz had little presence in the specialist press. In 1995, Rendering Ranger for the Super Famicom was released exclusively in Japan .

Turrican 3D

In December 1999, THQ's Turrican 3D was to be released. Rainbow Arts was bought by Softgold in the same year and Softgold by THQ. Advance reports from some computer game magazines presented impressive screenshots . The PC Action printed from an interview with Manfred Trenz. Even the necessary technical specifications that the PC had to bring along were printed in PC Action , for example : Pentium 300 MHz, 32 MB RAM, Windows 95/98 / NT. Trenz's partner in the development was the architecture company AllVision . By working with AllVision, Trenz hoped to create an architecturally impressive game world. The development was stopped in 2000 without an official statement. A short comment by Trenz, which can be found on the Internet, suggests, however, that he must have fallen out with AllVision . In it he accuses them of greed for money.

present

After the Turrican 3D debacle, only two console versions from Trenz appeared, Micro Machines V3 for the Game Boy Color in 2000 and CT Special Forces for the PlayStation in 2003. However, with these games he was able to share in the success of his C64 titles no longer tie in. For some time Manfred Trenz developed for the company Similis in Oberhausen. He founded in late 2004, the merger with Smash designs , the company Denaris Entertainment Software (DES) and announced the first project a continuation of Katakis for PC and C64 to. There was no news for the whole of 2005, in a short announcement in December '05 Trenz announced that he was involved in other projects and that the release of Katakis 2 would therefore be postponed indefinitely. The development of the project is currently on hold (as of December 2008). In recent years, Trenz has mainly developed for the GameBoy Advance and Nintendo DS systems. His most recent project was a Nintendo DS adaptation of Ankh , which was released as Ankh: The Curse of the Scarab King in the second quarter of 2008.

In April 2011, Trenz and his development team finally presented graphics and game scenes for Katakis 2 at the demo scene event Revision 2011 and published a first trailer on the video platform YouTube , which scheduled the release of the title in late summer 2011 without the game being released.

Ludography

  • The Great Giana Sisters (graphics and level design on the C64, 1987)
  • Katakis / Denaris (C64, 1988)
  • R-Type (conversion of the arcade game to the C64, 1988)
  • Turrican (C64, 1990)
  • Turrican II (C64 / Amiga, 1991)
  • Super Turrican ( NES , 1992)
  • Enforcer (C64, 1992)
  • Rendering Ranger (SNES, 1995)
  • Micro Machines V3 (conversion of Playstation and PC games to GameBoy Color , 2000)
  • CT Special Forces (Game Boy Advance game conversion to PlayStation , 2003)
  • Crazy Frog Racer ( Game Boy Advance , 2005)
  • My animal pension (conversion of the PC game to the Nintendo DS , 2006)
  • My veterinary practice (conversion of the PC game to the Game Boy Advance , 2006)
  • Dragon's Rock - Drachenfels ( Game Boy Advance , 2006)
  • WinneToons - The Legend of the Treasure in Silver Lake ( Nintendo DS , 2007)
  • Germanys Next Topmodel ( Nintendo DS , 2008)
  • Ankh - The Curse of the Scarab King ( Nintendo DS , 2008)

Web links