Hydrogenese was one of many impressive games developed by the talented team at X-Ample, known for producing high-quality titles. ASM magazine (issue 7/89) featured a brief news piece stating that Mario van Zeist and X-Ample had been hired to develop games for Digital Marketing. The article highlighted Hydrogenese and Bamboo, but a supposed connection to BWB turned out to be a red herring. It was later confirmed by Joachim Fraeder that X-Ample was indeed behind Hydrogenese, with Helge Kozielek handling the coding, and Michael Detert and Thomas Heinrich responsible for the graphics. The game’s sprites and backgrounds were later reused in Parsec.
According to ASM, Hydrogenese was designed as a shoot-’em-up in the style of Armalyte or Menace, featuring four heroes, each with unique strengths and weaknesses. Players would choose between these heroes to clear out the weapon systems of a spaceship. Additionally, they were to have the ability to control cleaning robots remotely. The original concept included both shoot-’em-up segments and four-way scrolling platformer levels, similar to Hawkeye 2, with some guidance from Mario van Zeist to Helge Kozielek on achieving this.
However, the game never reached completion. Initially, it was planned to be part of a 25,000 DM contest held by the disk magazine Game On, but it missed the deadline. As a result, Helge wasn’t able to finish the game, and it was eventually divided into several other projects and completed by different programmers.
Elements of Hydrogenese were incorporated into other titles: Tales of Boon, Darksword, and Greystorm used the jump-and-run levels, Parsec featured some of the shoot-’em-up levels, and Hyper Aggressive incorporated the puzzle sections and parts of the music. Thomas Detert’s music from Hydrogenese was ultimately spread across various games. Fortunately, thanks to Se7en/Digital Excess, the original music demo that Thomas produced is now available for download.
Although it is believed that the original version of Hydrogenese is lost, we still hope that it might resurface someday. For now, many of its elements live on in the aforementioned titles. Be sure to explore them to catch glimpses of the game, and check out Creator Speaks for insights directly from the developers!
Coding: Helge Kozielek
Graphics: Michael Detert, Thomas Heinrich
Sound: Thomas Detert
