It’s been 20 years since my brother Juan Carlos and I developed our first commercial game, Stardust. It was a fairly straightforward vertical shoot’em up game, where you flew your ship over massive space stations.

The original idea from Jose Manuel Muñoz was quite different. When he saw our Uridium-inspired graphics concepts, he envisioned a game where battleships would duel in space. The player would be in control of one of them, and was able to configure the weapons and shield to optimize the performance of the spaceship in combat.

Back then we had no idea what he was talking about. 🙂 What he described sounded nothing like the kind of games we were playing, so we simply pushed our more mainstream design and used his ideas to build and tune the station’s weapons and moving platform defenses.

A few years ago, Hikoza T Ohkubo released a fantastic freeware arena shooter called Warning Forever. The idea is to destroy progressively tougher boss spaceships with evolving weapon and hull configurations. Earlier this year, another boss-based shooter called Fraxy came out and became a cult success. Sean Chan just released the Warning Forever-inspired RTS game Battleships Forever. It is a really great game and deserves the best of lucks in the IGF competition next year.

I imagine Jose Manuel seeing these games and thinking "We should have been making these games back in 1987!". If so, then yeah man, we should have; I’m not sure how the poor ZX Spectrum would have handled, but hey. 🙂 Another idea I remember him and Javier Cano discussing was about a game where you would have to save dozens of little guys from buildings on fire… again, I couldn’t even imagine how to make a game out of that, but a few years later, some bedroom coder in the UK came up with Lemmings.

So, in the 20th anniversary of Stardust’s release, I want to say a big THANK YOU to Jose Manuel Muñoz and Javier Cano. You guys took Juan Carlos and I, a couple of aspiring programmers, and created two game developers for life.