Do you remember Greve Graphics? If you're not from Sweden, probably not. They produced a couple of games, none of which was a real success, and then disappeared. In the Swedish computer magazines there were lots of interviews with them and articles about them. We really got to know everything about them, e.g. why they chose the name Greve Graphics. One of the guys didn't like to get his hair cut, so his friends thought he looked like an old count (greve in Swedish). They started calling him "Greven" ("the count"), and when it was time to choose a name for the company they chose Greve Graphics. What an extremely important bit of computer history...
Below are the games they made. I think these four should be all. A big THANK YOU goes to Rio, who found Blood'n'Guts for me. Why don't you visit his CD-64 homepage. Before Greve Graphics ceased to exist they were bragging about their upcoming game, which was to be called "Gorminium", or something like that. Has anyone ever seen this game (or at least a preview)? E-mail me and tell me about it.
Soldier One was Greve Graphics' first game. Your mission is to attack and conquer an enemy fortress... alone, of course. It starts at sea, where you have to hit the enemy gunships before they hit you. Then you must land at the beach and advance towards the fortress. This may sound a bit like a description of one of the most popular early C-64 games, Beach Head. Soldier One resembles (or copies...) Beach Head a lot, and just like Beach Head it's a good game. Why don't you download it and see for yourself? (38 kB)
Captured was the second game from Greve Graphics. It was supposed to be the sequel to Soldier One, but it doesn't resemble that one at all. You are still the same soldier, but now you have entered the fortress. The interior of it is quite bizarre, just see the screen shot below... It's a jump and run game, and it's actually quite funny. My younger brother played this game every day for months, after a while we had to hide the disk with the game on... (46 kB)
This is just what it sounds like, a 1942 clone. It's not as good as 1942 though, the graphics are a lot worse and it's not really much fun at all. But if you're a fanatic collector of world war II games, you should have it in your collection. (31 kB)
You could say this is a clone of Epyx Winter Games, Summer Games, World Games and so on, but that really would be stretching the term "clone" quite a bit. It is some sort of sports game, but you won't ever see the sports that you compete in in Blood'n'Guts on TV. It's supposed to be viking sports, but I don't think vikings competed in bizarre events like tower jumping (yep, it's exactly what it sounds like, you jump from a tower and try to land on your feet). That's not really important, though, this is an original and good "sports" game (maybe I'm stretching the term "sport" quite a bit now...). The first thing you do is to choose your character...
...then you just choose which event to compete in, and get into the action, in events like the above mentioned tower jump (I've never really understood what to do in this one, maybe I can find the instructions for the game somewhere on the web), ale drinking, pole fight, arm wrestling and axe throwing. There's a lot of violence in this game, so I don't think you should play it if you're under eighteen... Of course the graphic violence in this game is nothing compared to more recent games. I prefer games where all the violence is directed agains little beeping space aliens. This is a good game however, with a lot of variation and with great graphics and sound. (Below is a screen shot from the ale drinking event.) (151 kB)
