Morkin II

Morkin II was developed in 1996 by Anthony P. Hamilton of Pow Productions, making it one of the earliest Chaos remakes. It supported 5 human or AI-controlled players.

History
First there was Morkin; a now long-lost game I designed for the Atari ST in about 1991 written in Basic and released into the public domain. It was inspired by an addictive little game for the ZX Spectrum called Viking Raiders. My version was 2-player only and saved a game file after your turn to be sent to the other player. Many people played this game via the f-mail option of BBS systems running at the time and was quite possibly one of the first wide area turn-based network games. It also featured digital sound effects at a time it was rare to hear such a thing in even a commercial game.

Then of course came Morkin II, inspired of course by the ZX Spectrum classic game called Chaos. The original version was designed on the Atari ST in GFA Basic using 16 colour graphics and also released into the public domain. It also had an f-mail option allowing anyone anywhere to take their turn once the game file has been passed on to them. This was a hugely popular feature of game at the time and to my knowledge was played for years after. I left the Atari ST world behind once I was introduced to the world of PCs we have come to know today. I used the Zortec C compiler on my 80286 computer to port the Atari ST version of Morkin II to the PC from Basic to C line-by-line of source code in only one week and the 16 colour graphics were also touched up using a massive 256 colours. This impressed an employer so much at the time that they offered me a job there and then. My older brother helped with the conversion by writing a graphics library in assembly language which Morkin II uses.

The name 'Morkin' is a character in the ZX Spectrum game Lords of Midnight and it also exists in the dictionary and relates to undead. I got the name from one of them two sources but I will not admit to which.

The name Conan appears in the copyright notice of Morkin II and perhaps many of the other games and applications I designed around that time. There is a lot of history behind this, but needless to say it was my nick-name at the time. In my youth I had long unkempt hair and a very small physique so some people saw fit to ironically name me after a barbarian. The nickname stuck with me for years after until I decided that it didn't suit me any more. Some of my very old friends still call me by it and some people who I have met only know me by this name and no other.

So there we have it; the full history of Morkin II. In the future I have big plans for this game and a sequel but I will not give too much away. Needless to say that all will be revealed when the time comes.



Sprite Editor
The Morkin editor allows you to edit the graphics in Morkin II. It's copyright John Elliott, 14 September 1996. It also includes a patch for Morkin II which changes the font to original Chaos. (Direct link)