Development and release history

; Exploring K240, a disassembly project

This article chronicles the development and release of K240, a 1994 strategy game published by Gremlin Graphics for the Commodore Amiga.

  1. Background
    1. Origins: K240’s predecessor Utopia
    2. Utopia: The New Worlds
  2. Development of K240
    1. 1992
    2. 1993
    3. 1994
  3. Publication
  4. Reception
  5. Miscellaneous
    1. Sequel: Fragile Allegiance
    2. Gremlin Interactive
  6. Detailed timeline
    1. 1991
    2. 1992
    3. 1993
    4. 1994
    5. 1995 onward

Background

Origins: K240’s predecessor Utopia

K240 is fundamentally a sequel to Utopia: The Creation of a Nation, a planetary colony management sim released around September 1991. We would today recognize Utopia’s genre as a “real-time strategy” (RTS), although it was only after Utopia’s release that the genre was named and defined by Dune II (1992) and refined by games like Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994) and Command & Conquer (1995). Amiga magazines instead interpreted Utopia as a god game like Populous, while Utopia’s programmer Graeme Ing instead thought of it as a management strategy simulation like Sim City.

The development of Utopia was detailed in a series of articles in Games-X magazine. Games-X #1 page 44 describes how Utopia was originally planned as a fantasy city-building sim titled Fantasym, inspired by Sim City (1989). The game was pitched to publisher Gremlin in June 1990 as the developers, Graeme Ing and Robert Crack, finished work on BSS Jane Seymour (also called Spacewrecked).

The game setting was soon changed from fantasy to futuristic in order to replace ground units with spaceships, avoiding the challenge of writing unit pathfinding code and making unit movement more dynamic (although the final game would feature ground units with terrain and pathfinding anyway). The game was given a working title of World, and by early August 1990 a roughly 100-page specification had been written. It was initially designed with a top-down view, with a custom-made map editor tool, although it would change to isometric view similar to Populous. The game used some code from BSS Jane Seymour. In September 1990, Ing acquired a development PC running SNASM68K, a cross-assembly system connected to the Amiga via SCSI.

In Games-X #4 pages 40-41, Ing describes the technical challenges of actually turning his map builder into a working game. The simulation was kept relatively simple in order to retain sufficient CPU for the sprite engine. Ing advises developers to add game rules one at a time and test as they go, and to keep careful notes about game data structures. In November he incorporated Gremlin’s in-house disk routines to make the game bootable without SNASM, and discovered that this actually made it difficult to copy his own disk, although he was able to find one disk copying tool which could copy it. (Utopia used NDOS format disks which could not be copied normally by Workbench; K240 would later use the standard Amiga disk format, allowing for hard disk installs.)

In Games-X #8 page 30 Ing describes that at the start of December 1990 he began work on the sprite engine, the largest piece of code. The code for actually drawing the sprites took a full day, while it took longer to write code to prevent from colliding with terrain or with one another.

The One Amiga #35 (August 1991) pages 48-50 went into some detail on the game’s development process. The switch from top-down to isometric created a lot of technical challenges, such as unit pathfinding and drawing sprites moving behind buildings. A modified version of the game was used as an isometric map editor. At time of the article’s writing (probably June or July 1991), only the first scenario was completed, but there were already plans for an expansion disk. The trading and spying features were yet to be implemented. The article ended with a brief suggestion that Ing’s next game would be an even bigger strategy title.

The Utopia article series was concluded in August 1991 with a preview in Games-X #15 p.43. It was joined that month by previews in The One Amiga #35 (who complained that it was likely to draw out tired comparisons to Populous and Sim City) and CU Amiga (who described it as a cross between Populous and Sim City).

Amiga Format #26 in September 1991 noted that the game’s tactical control features were not finished at time of going to press (around August 1991). Amiga Power #5 interviewed Ing, who described it as inspired by Sim City but with the addition of an enemy, and with an isometric view in order to appear more visually impressive.

CU Amiga (Sep 1991) described that it took artist Berni Hill six weeks to create all of the game’s graphics on an Amiga with Deluxe Paint III. Berni described his hopes of working on a Super Nintendo game next, which he would realize as a horizon artist in Gremlin’s Top Gear 2.

Reviews of Utopia varied. Games-X #17 reviewed Utopia on pages 16-17, rating it 4.5 out of 5 and announcing the Amiga release for September 1991, with an Atari ST release in October 1991. CU Amiga rated it 94%, awarding it the coveted Super Star and describing it as the best game Gremlin has ever released. However, Stuart Campbell rated it only three stars in New Computer Express, describing it as too easy and the game’s goal of increasing a quality of life statistic to be unsatisfying. Campbell also reviewed it at 81% for Amiga Power #6, complaining that it lacked depth and direction, and that the small screen size made it hard to get an overview of the entire colony.

Utopia thus took 15 months from initial conception to release with only a single programmer, although some game code was re-used from Ing’s previous game and Gremlin libraries.

Utopia: The New Worlds

CU Amiga’s review of Utopia in September 1991 hinted that a sequel was already in the works, quoting Graeme Ing as saying “I like my games to get bigger every time”.

An interview with Graeme Ing appeared in Amiga Action #28 (Jan 1992). Graeme describes Utopia’s main literary influences as Larry Niven’s Ringworld and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, while its game design was influenced by a desire to expand on the concepts introduced by Sim City. However, he admits that the off-screen final confrontation with the alien was anticlimactic. Ing predicted that the Amiga had at least five more years as a viable gaming platform, but that it would move toward big strategy titles. (An era of landmark strategy titles would indeed take place, but on the PC, not the Amiga.)

He also announced two follow-ups to Utopia: an expansion disk, and a fully-fledged sequel, Utopia 2. Early plans for Utopia 2 included more advanced alien AI, the ability to see the alien city, and the ability to target individual alien buildings. Gremlin Graphics even offered five signed copies of Utopia in a contest seeking innovative ideas for the sequel.

At the end of 1991 when the interview took place (magazines usually released earlier than the month on the cover), Utopia 2 was still in the planning stage, but its release was scheduled for the end of 1992.

However, according to a preview in The One Amiga #59 (Aug 1993), development on Utopia 2 did not actually start until May of 1992. This may be due to Graeme first spending four months of 1992 working on the Utopia expansion disk Utopia: The New Worlds, according to a review in the April 1992 issue of CU Amiga.

The Utopia expansion disk received middling reviews, rated only 72% by CU Amiga’s Tony Dillon, who felt the price of £15 for new levels to an existing game was too steep. Amiga Power’s Stuart Campbell argued that even reviewing a data disk was irrelevant: such expansions never radically change a game’s core features, meaning that readers do not need any new information to inform their purchasing decision—if you liked the original you’ll like the expansion, and if you didn’t, you won’t.

Among the scenarios in the Utopia data disk was a set of islands requring the player to build spaceships to cross between them, which would become a core mechanic of K240.

Development of K240

1992

Insight into K240’s early development comes primarily from four magazine previews which interviewed Graeme Ing: Amiga Action #28 (Jan 1992) pages 60-61, The One Amiga #59 (Aug 1993) pages 40-41, Amiga Action #48 (Sep 1993) pages 58-49, and CU Amiga (March 1994) pages 62-63.

The One #59 gives a start date of May 1992 for K240’s development, originally given the working title of Utopia 2. March 1994’s CU Amiga describes it as being developed “on and off” for nearly two years, which would concur.

Like Utopia, development of K240 began by writing a large design document. The original concept was a military space strategy game which would expand on Utopia. The concept of asteroids was added a few days into the design stage. Other early ideas included more advanced AI, the ability to see the enemy settlement directly, and the ability to control your units in a tactical fashion to target individual key buildings.

However, the original design was massively over-ambitious, and Ing later admitted that it would have taken over five years to implement all the features originally planned. Many features were removed or changed from the original plan during the game’s development, in some cases because gameplay issues were found with game mechanics in developer testing, and in others because they were found to be technically not feasible, such as null modem multiplayer.

Despite initial claim of a release by the end of 1992, development continued through the second half of the year and into 1993. An screenshot from an early stage of development (no later than July 1993) appearing CU Amiga Mar 1994 shows a test of the dialog box system, an older version of the starfield background, a familiar asteroid layout, and buildings recognizable as the Protected Solar Matrix, Solar Generator, Plasma Turret, a Command Centre, an alien Ore Eaters’ Civilian Dome, and scaffolding.

According to a 2014 interview with artist Pete Daniels in RetroGamer issue 134, all of the game’s art was created on an Amiga 500 in Deluxe Paint. He describes K240 as being developed on an Amiga and taking only six months to develop, although this may be referring to the graphics only, since the finished game evidently took significantly longer.

1993

Much of the game’s graphics and core features were completed by July 1993. Screenshots previewed in The One #59 show largely finalized graphics, including the font, ship building window layout, missile targeting input screen with accuracy readout and asteroid direction marking, an updated starfield pattern, Vortex and fire-based weapon effects, and Asteroid Engines.

However, we see older sprites for several ships and buildings, including the Battleship, Transporter, Transporter wireframe, more colourful palettes on several Terran ships (a trait mentioned in the game manual), Construction Yard, Environment Control, and a pagoda-like building sprite which does not appear to represent any Terran building in the final game.

Buttons have been extracted for the fleet, ship cursor, missile, fleet submenu, asteroid submenu, building window, and detonate buttons; the PANEL cheat in the final game would show these plus the contents of the asteroid submenu, financial button, geological analysis button, and Sci-Tek button, suggesting that perhaps blueprints were not yet implemented, or at least not being tested.

The One #59 introduces it as an asteroid mining game with military strategy gameplay, originally intended to be set in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which we still see referenced on the cover the final game’s manual (“Magellanic Mining Guidelines”). Amiga Action #48, the following month, gives a similar interview with many of the same screenshots, and we can see some slightly different ship statistics, including a Transporter which builds in 50 days instead of 114, Plasma Cannons priced at only 1000 credits, and ships with impossible configurations (high Armour values not possible in the final game even with Shield x50). The date format also begins with “Y” rather than “E”.

By this point, alien scenarios were still intended to include sub-missions like destroying shield generators, disabling convoys, locating bases, or finding before the enemy. None of these special missions would make it into the game except for the Swixaran cloak generator sub-mission. Ing already lamented at this point that certain features had to be cut for time or technical limitations, such as more advanced AI.

Last-minute information in the The One article announced the name: “K240”, although it appears to conflates it with the title of the Utopia 1 expansion, calling it K240 - the new worlds. Amiga Action #48 makes the same mistake, calling the game K240: The New World. The name change to K240 may have been to differentiate it from Utopia in order to stand as its own, more advanced game.

According to the game’s producer, Mark Glossop, the name “K240” was coined when the team, unable to come up with a good name, looked around the room for ideas and spotted a VHS tape bearing the text “K 240”. At a reasonable estimate, this may have been a TDK brand 240 minute tape. Several such tapes seen online bear the number “240” beneath the letter “K”. The name was not really intended to mean anything, although it would eventually come to be the name of the sector in which the game takes place.

The Amiga Action #48 article gives us a familiar count of 40 buildings (as in the final game) and 16 weapons (technically 16 hardpoints, half of those being shields). It describes a count of 7 ship types, one short of the final game. I suspect the ship missing at this point (Aug 1993) is the Orbital Space Dock, the name string for which appears much later in the strings list than the rest. The NASA cheat code string in the CU Amiga demo reads “ENTER SHIP 1-7” rather than “ENTER SHIP 1-8”, so the OSD may well have been added after August 1993. It’s entirely possible that the space dock was inspired by Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the first episode of which aired in the UK for the first time on 1 August 1993.

A preview in Amiga Power #30 (Oct 1993) suggests that you would have to invest time and money into research, though in the final game you just buy them as blueprints. Given that the Sci-Tek button didn’t appear in the earlier screenshots, it’s possible that technology was originally supposed to be researched rather than bought. A release date is given for “September”, presumably meaning September 1993, another release date that the game would miss.

Despite a release date on December 1993 given in The One #59, the game would not be released until 1994.

1994

In 1994, we begin to get into what can be determined from file dates in the run-up to the game’s release, as well as some more in-depth previews.

A short preview in Amiga Format #56 (Feb 1994) has a screenshot which shows a few things of note. The layout of the extracted buttons is identical to that of the PANEL cheat, which means asteroid rotation and blueprint purchases are in the game at this point. The Construction Yard sprite is similar to the CU Amiga demo rather than the final version. There are two non-Terran large ships at a Terran colony. We can also see two numbers in the top-left of the screen, probably some kind of debug information (this also appears in the 1993 screenshots).

File dates in the retail release show the finishing touches being put on the game for distribution at this point. In February and March 1994, disks 1 and 2 gain startup-sequence files, and disk 3 gains a hard disk installer (adapted from the installer for HeroQuest II: Legacy of Sorasil (1994)).

A lot of unique development information is revealed in an in-depth preview in the March 1994 issue of CU Amiga. Tony Dillon drove to Sheffield to interview Graeme Ing in person, something CU Amiga often did, alllowing them access to some unique information, in this including case sprite sheets and the intro graphics.

Something interesting appears in the screenshot of the alien load screen. We see the Swixaran sprite, but what looks like the Ax’Zilanth homeworld (and some placeholder text). This makes sense because both of these have the ID number #1, being stored in alienp1.mgl and planet1.mgl respectively, despite neither actually being used for alien #1 in the game.

The CU Amiga preview describes that an entirely new feature was added just before the interview, though the article doesn’t say what it was.

Included with that magazine is the K240 demo, which represents an earlier version of the game code than the final retail release, and presumably a similar state to that described in the magazine issue. Given publication deadlines for the March issue of CU Amiga, the demo was probably completed in January 1994, February at the latest. We can’t tell exact dates from disk analysis as the filenames are dated 1978, meaning the disk was prepared on an Amiga without

More analysis of the demo executable needs to be done to determine what features already existed in that version.

The CU Amiga demo’s win screen promises a release in March 1994, which it would also miss. A possible reason for the delay is that Ing also worked on other games for Gremlin in 1993 and 1994, including CD development for the CD32 ports of Striker and Zool.

Publication

On 29 April 1994, Commodore International declared bankruptcy. This did not prevent the release of K240, but likely discouraged Gremlin Graphics from releasing further games for the platform.

According to producer Mark Glossop, a random crash bug occurred near the end of development, which was difficult to trace. The game could not be delayed, due to marketing and duplicating deadlines. Gremlin worked 12 to 14 hour days attempting to find and fix the cause of the bug, which involved lead programmer Graeme Ing producing massive hex dumps and playing the game for hours.

The final retail build of K240, version 1.886, was completed on Friday 20 May 1994 at 13:31.

Due to how close it was to the deadline, Mark Glossop had to personally deliver the master floppies to the disk duplication company in Burnley or thereabouts (some 65 miles or so from Sheffield), signing off on the game as bug free. A run of 30,000 copies was produced. (It is uncertain whether Glossop is referring to the v1.886 release or the v2.000 release here.)

K240, presumably, was released shortly thereafter.

A copy of the game was quickly acquired by someone credited as “Troops & Troll” and provided to pirate groups TRSI & Zenith (TRZ), who quickly stripped the manual copy-protection from the game (a two-byte change) and released a pirate copy on 26 May 1994. In other words, the game was cracked not within six days of going on sale, but within six days of the finished build.

A second build of the game, v2.000, was completed on Tuesday, 7 June 1994 at 11:15 am. Lead programmer Graeme Ing recalls that it was produced to fix bugs. Analysis of the game shows that the only substantive change was to fix the fleet bug, a random crash which sometimes occurred when moving fleets.

Patrick Phelan is credited with providing the game’s music. However, K240 has no music. Leave a reply if you know the answer to this mystery.

Reception

Several magazines produced reviews of K240 for their May 1994 issue. Almost certainly, these magazines received a review copy of an earlier build, since magazines generally printed their May issue in April.

This review build is very close to the v1.886 release, and the review copies even included the game’s manual. However, a clue that this is not the final release is in the review in issue 68 of The One Amiga, which shows the game’s win screen using the Intel screen background. A likely reason for this is that the Swixaran win screen file, outro3.mgl, is too big for the buffer and can crash the Amiga. The review copy probably replaced all win screens with the Intel screen as a temporary fix; the final release actually just uses the normal win screen graphic outro1.mgl for a Swixaran win.

In an odd quirk, the review by the Dutch-language Amiga Magazine #29 (Sept-Oct 1994) uses gameplay screenshots from the CU Amiga demo, not the final game. The giveaway is the asteroid layout and the old sprite for the Environment Control (the white building at the right).

Reviews of K240 in the Amiga press were positive. CU Amiga rated it 91%, receiving the CU Screen Star award for games recieving 85-92%, though missing out on the ultimate Super Star award. The One Amiga rated it 90%; Amiga Format 84%; and Amiga Power 83%.

These review scores would later appear in an advertisement for the game published in various Amiga magazines. Of note in this advertisement are the outdated screenshots from an earlier pre-release build of the game, which appear to pre-date the CU Amiga demo. They include an older version of the Sci-Tek screen with a bright blue background instead of the sophisticated graphics, and the byte font used in Utopia. There are also screens depicting the use of the PANEL and ICBM cheat codes. It also depicts the final box art; an earlier advertisement for Gremlin depicted a variant with art of an asteroid colony floating in space.

K240 was criticized by some reviewers for its complexity and unorthodox user interface. It appears that some copies of the game included a flyer advertising a 30-minute tutorial video for K240, with commentary by Graeme Ing. It cost £4.50 including P&P and was recorded on C180 VHS tape. It’s unknown how many copies were sold, if any, making this a rare artifact, perhaps a lost one.

Unlike Utopia, K240 did not receive an expansion disk, and the finished release did not include an option to load an optional scenario disk.

Miscellaneous

Sequel: Fragile Allegiance

According to an internal memo, a meeting about K240 was held on 11 April 1995 at 3:30 pm. The July 1995 issue of PC Power magazine announced that Gremlin was working on a PC remake of K240, as did the May 1995 issue of PC Games magazine. The game’s final title of Fragile Allegiance had evidently not been coined yet, but would begin to appear in the gaming press following the 1996 European Computer Trade Show (ECTS) held on 14–16 April 1996.

PC Power July 1995 preview of Fragile Allegiance
Promotional render for the K240 PC port in PC Power, July 1995.

This game was written by a completely different team of designers and programmers, but keeps most of K240’s basic mechanics and even maintains continuity with its lore. For example, the intro video cites Tetracorp’s founding in the year 2221, consistent with the K240 manual, which cites this as the year Tetracorp was founded to manufacture scoutships and sensors for the Imperial Fleet.

Fragile Allegiance was released for MS-DOS and Windows 95 in December 1996. Development of Fragile Allegiance may have taken up to two and a half years, assuming it began as soon as the Amiga version of K240 was finished.

Gremlin Interactive

Graeme Ing, sole programmer on K240, went on to work on a number of other titles, including Newman/Haas IndyCar featuring Nigel Mansell for Sega Mega Drive, Shadow Fighter (1995),Normality (1996), EverQuest (1999), Everquest II (2004), and the Star Wars: Galaxies series.

Pete Daniels, K240’s artist and co-designer, went on to work on games including World Championship Snooker 2004 (2004), Kinect Sports: Rivals, and Sea of Thieves (2018). In a 2014 interview with RetroGamer magazine, he spoke highly of K240 and expressed a wish to work a sequel with Graeme Ing one day.

Gremlin Interactive retained numerous floppy disks and backup CDs, although whether any of those still exist, who might have them, and whether any of them contain K240 data, is a mystery.

Detailed timeline

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995 onward

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