Opera Soft

~ the goodbye ~

Opera Soft closed in 1992. I was eight, six years away from my first modem, and the machines it wrote for were already being cleared off Spanish shelves by then. What I know about it I know the way anybody outside Spain knows it, which is through people who were teenagers there and have never stopped talking about one particular game.

The company was founded in 1986 by the entire development team of Indescomp, the outfit that was in the middle of turning itself into Amstrad España. Pedro Ruiz took the directorship, Paco Suárez took research and development, José Ramón Fernández Maqueira took the commercial side, Carlos A. Díaz de Castro ran the artists and José Antonio Morales Ortega ran the programmers. They had a cheap office lined up in Lavapiés, then a better offer came in near Ópera, so they moved and named the company after the neighborhood.

The debut was Livingstone Supongo in 1986, a platformer built around the search for Dr. Livingstone, and it sold. First games in that scene usually did not. Over the following six years Opera shipped a run of titles that a generation of Spanish kids can still recite: Goody, Mot, Sol Negro, Corsarios, Mutan Zone. There was a sports label, Opera Sport, and a second imprint, Opera Plus, split off near the end.

The games were not the only thing. Philips Ibérica commissioned Opera to write a graphical user interface for the MSX2 that could stand against Sony's, and the result was EGOS, which shipped bundled with the Philips NMS 8250 in 1989 along with a Spanish office suite. Philips lent them a 68000-based development system worth around seven million pesetas to do it on. They also wrote an accounting program for Banco Exterior de España. A house that is remembered for one isometric abbey was also writing banking software.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the abbey ~

La Abadía del Crimen, 1987, written by Paco Menéndez with graphics by Juan Delcán. It is an isometric adventure in which a Franciscan friar and his novice investigate a series of murders in a medieval Italian abbey over seven days, and it is Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose with the serial numbers filed off. Opera could not get the rights to the novel's title, so the game shipped under the working title Eco had used for the book before he settled on the published one.

What made it remarkable in 1987 was that the abbey ran without you. The monks had schedules. They walked their own routes and turned up for services and meals on time. The abbot had told Fra William at the start that he was obliged to obey the rules of the house, which meant the game would punish you for missing the offices while you were busy solving the murders. Novice Adso followed you around and reminded you when it was time to be somewhere. An 8-bit machine was running a monastery on a clock, and the player was a guest in it.

~ the decline ~

The Spanish golden age died all at once and for one reason. These houses were built on the ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC, machines that four people in a rented flat could write for, and they sold into a domestic market that bought cassettes at a price the whole arrangement depended on. The Amiga and the Atari ST raised the cost of making a game past what that model could carry, and the PC finished the job. Opera's last titles came out in 1992, and Spain's biggest publisher of the era, Dinamic, went under the same year.

operasoft.es answers today with a 336-byte page that meta-refreshes to something called defaultsite. It is a parking stub with no connection to any of this, which at least has the decency not to pretend.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »