Hi Michael, Well, there were a couple of reasons why I changed the name from Montezuma's Revenge to Montezuma's Return. One of the reasons I changed the name is that the term "Montezuma's revenge" is American slang for chronic diarrhea. I always thought that was a grose and disgusting name for a game. Although, it is based on the historical fact that Emperor Montizuma, the last emperor of the Aztec Empire, was apparently constantly ill and suffered bad cases of diarrhea and the Spanish guards who held him captive in 1520 jokingly refered to his sickness as "Montezuma's revenge." It has been passed down by word of mouth ever since as slang or as a joke when some one is sick with the flu.
The other reason I felt the game needed a slight name change is that although I was trying to stick to the original game there were people who had never played the original who wanted me to change various aspects of the game. To update it or add new ideas to it. I was strongly against that, but never-the-less hoping to make the game marketable I slowly gave into some demands and made changes that didn't make it authentic. Therefore in my mind the game I was creating was not an exact clone or copy of the game, but more like a spin-off of the original. Therefore a new name was needed. However, when I changed the name to Montezuma's Return I had no clue that there was a game out there already with that name. I had never heard of it. The only game I knew of in that series was the original Montezuma's Revenge by Parker Brothers in the 1980's. I'm sure googling the name might have turned up results or gave me proof that another game existed, and I would have chosen a different name altogether, but as things happened I just assumed no game was using that title and got burned for it. As for Mysteries of the Aztecs that was a temperary name I stuck on Montezuma's Revenge/Return until I decided what to do with the game. I figured since Utopia wanted me to take down the game rather than argue with them I would take it down and write something completely different and be done with the entire business. That's what I did. Finally, as to why you seem to be getting less, as in only two levels with Mysteries of the Ancients beta 22, when there were six complete levels in Montezuma's Return beta 9 that's an easy thing to explain. As I've explained many times The majority of the work done between 2008 and 2011 was work on the Genesis 3D Engine. It is a high level game creation toolkit that will help USA Games produce games faster by having fully developed common classes and modules for input, speech, sound, performing 3d calculations, and so on. What set us behind schedule is I started out using .Net, found out it wasn't going to work, looked at a couple other languages, and decided to rewrite the engine from scratch in C++. If I had written the engine from the start in C++ or was still using the .Net version of the engine chances are very good not only would have the engine been completed faster so would Mysteries of the Ancients itself. The bottom line here is the game has not been the primary goal for the last two/three years and was only there to test the engine and make sure it worked before I actually sat down and wrote the game itself. With Montezuma's Return I wrote that as a stand alone game. I was just learning .Net and Managed DirectX so sort of hobbled it together as I went along. That's why even though it had six complete levels there are some rather nasty bugs in the game where you can jump through walls, freeze while jumping up, and a few other weird bugs like that. Truth is in order to fix some of those kinds of bugs I was going to have to rewrite the game anyway eventually to resolve/fix the problems. Cheers! --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
