They’ll see things you people wouldn’t believe.
The RISC OS User Group of London (ROUGOL) next meets up on Monday, 15th July, and this month they’ll be hallucinating. No, wait, I meant they’ll have Nathan Atkinson from Visions of the Impossible as their guest speaker.
Visions of the Impossible (or VotI) were a programming group active in the 1990s, and brought a number of titles to the RISC OS platform, including games, demos, and utilities. One of their more well known games was Sunburst, a game in which you may well have seen attack ships on fire – well, okay, exploding, and you’d just have to imagine they were off the shoulder of Orion.
Another well known title was Super Foul Egg, a game which can best be described as Tetris, but where the blocks are replaced by coloured eggs, and – like Tetris – there are no C-beams to watch glittering by the Tannhäuser gate.
All these moments, rather than being lost in time (like tears, if you will, in rain) will be talked about by Nathan at the meeting, where he will cover the history of VotI and their various titles, including some behind the scenes stories, and details of how the port of The Bitmap Brothers classic Chaos Engine to RISC OS came about – as well as the port of the RISC OS classic Starfighter 3000 to the 3DO console.
Nathan will also talk about software that never reached fruition, with titles such as Simisu San and racing game Eat my Dust – an unfinished game at the point VotI closed down in 2002 – and a project that the group was working on in conjunction with Acorn, with the working title DeathRacer 4000 – until Acorn decided it was time to die.
The meeting will be both in-person and virtual, with the physical aspect taking place at:
The Duke of Sussex,
(upstairs in either the Chichester or Petworth Room),
23 Baylis Road,
London,
SE1 7AY.
The meeting proper will start at 7:45pm, but there should be ROUGOL members lurking in the pub from around 6:30pm, while online attendees can join the meeting from around 7:30pm.
If you are attending in person, the pub is very easy to reach via public transport, and there is parking right outside for anyone coming by car – there are directions available on the ROUGOL website.
If you are attending online, this will be via Zoom. and the credentials you need to join the meeting are the same as previous months – so you should have them if you’ve joined previously, otherwise simply get in touch with ROUGOL to receive them by email.
