Archive notice: This article was originally published on May 14, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Fan games are becoming increasingly popular within the gaming community. According to pressetext, a current example is the recently released “Zak McKracken – between time and space”. Produced by a team of hobby developers, the game is a further development of the original “Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders” from 1988, which has since become a classic.
Because the original publisher Lucas Arts no longer pursued the project, some fans simply organised themselves to breathe new life into the old game. Over years of painstaking work, with a relatively small team, they sacrificed much of their free time to move closer to realising their fan project. “At the beginning, people probably did not really believe we would finish it. But the completed version of our game has now been available to download for free from our homepage for two weeks”, says a delighted Thomas “Marvel” Dibke, project leader of the unofficial second Zak McKracken instalment, in an interview with pressetext.
“It all started towards the end of 2001, when it became clear once and for all that no official successor to the original Lucas Arts game would be developed”, Dibke recalls. Together with a colleague from the large Zak McKracken fan community, he then came up with the idea of developing the title further himself. “Above all, we wanted to make use of the great creative freedom needed to realise our own ideas for the game”, Dibke explains. When it finally became clear that they would actually set about realising the project, the team also tried to contact Lucas Arts. “But apparently we were not taken very seriously at the time. In any case, we could not get a meeting there to negotiate the corresponding use of the licence”, Dibke recounts. When it became apparent in the final development phase that the game would indeed be completed, he did at least meet the original game’s lead developers in San Francisco. “We received neither official approval nor an express prohibition for our project from Lucas Arts”, Dibke states.
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Unlike the professionals at Lucas Arts, the team responsible for the current Zak McKracken instalment consists entirely of hobby developers. “Finding suitable people for our team was quite difficult at the beginning”, Gibke explains. Over the more than six years it took to complete the game, its composition changed repeatedly. “Only over time did a core team of ten people emerge”, Dibke adds. Alongside enthusiasm for the game’s title character, Zak McKracken, other aspects were also decisive in the enormous motivation of everyone involved. “From the start, we were not interested in commercial gain, but in improving our personal knowledge of game development and giving free rein to our creativity”, Gibke sums up.
The enormous demand for the new Zak McKracken instalment is further confirmation that such game classics still have a very large fan base. “Our game has already been downloaded more than 100,000 times”, Gibke notes. The high level of public response also far exceeded his expectations. “All of this shows that interest in such games, which put the enjoyment of playing first rather than graphics, is growing strongly again”, Gibke concludes.
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