Team Hoi

~ the last words ~

There was no games industry in the Netherlands in 1988, so the four people who became Team Hoi had to write to England instead. Metin Seven, who had come up through the Commodore 64 cracking scene, put an advertisement in a newspaper to sell his Amiga 1000 and through the buyer met two programmers from Alphen aan den Rijn, Reinier van Vliet and Pieter Opdam. With the composer Ramon Braumuller from Naarden they formed a group called Electronic Audio Recordings, intending to sell music for other people's games. The British publishers they approached wanted finished games, not soundtracks, so they became a development team by default and renamed themselves Soft Eyes.

The music tools came first and lasted longest. SIDmon in 1989 was the first Amiga editor to mix synthesized sound with samples, which mattered enormously when RAM was the binding constraint on a game's soundtrack. Digital Mugician followed in 1990, and its second version pulled a trick that only Chris Hülsbeck's TFMX otherwise managed: it expanded the Amiga's four Paula audio channels to seven using the 68000 itself, without the audible quality loss that usually came from splitting channels.

Then came the games. Venom Wing, a shoot 'em up with Oliver Frey cover art, went out through Thalamus in 1990 and got 80% in The Games Machine. Borobodur followed in 1992 and was taken apart, scoring 34% in Amiga Power and 35% in Amiga Format. Hoi arrived the same year, a bright side-scrolling platformer starring a small green creature, and it split the critics harder than anything else they made: 90% in The One Amiga, 60% from Gary Penn in Amiga Power, who called it amazingly frustrating junk, and 50% in Amiga Joker. The group took its name from that game, because that game was the one people had heard of.

Hoi shipped when I was eight, six years before I first dialed up, and the machine I eventually dialed up on was a PC in Turkey rather than an Amiga. This is a European story argued out in Dutch and settled in British magazines. What finally reached me was the 2026 revival, at the same moment it reached everybody else.

~ the record ~

~ soft eyes ~

The team never had premises. Seven was in Bussum, Braumuller in Naarden, Van Vliet and Opdam in Alphen aan den Rijn, and the work moved by floppy disk through the post and by hand at meetings. Opdam left around 1993 for Team17 in England, where he worked on Worms. Their first project, a jetpack maze game called Ragnov, died in 1988 when Van Vliet lost every source file to a failed backup, and the same thing happened years later to the Peanutbutter Power Game.

That advergame deserves its own line. Commissioned through an agency for Calvé and Unilever in 1992, it was the first Dutch computer game made specifically to sell something, it was played by children on the television program Telekids for prizes of stacked peanut butter jars, and in 2018 it was entered into the national Dutch Games Canon. The source code no longer exists.

~ nobody paid them ~

The thread running through every one of these releases is that the money did not arrive. Turtle Byte published SIDmon in 1989 and never paid a royalty; Seven and Van Vliet traveled to a trade show in Cologne to ask about it in person and came home with nothing, and in 1991 Turtle Byte put out an unauthorized sequel to the editor. Hollyware paid a $200 advance on Hoi in the United States and then stopped. Rasputin published Clockwiser in 1994, which reviewed well across the Amiga press at around 80%, and paid nothing despite formal demands. Van Vliet's later summary of why they never sued was that they lacked both the cash and the will.

Their answer to Hollyware was to give the game away. In 1993 they released a free remix of Hoi for the newer AGA Amigas, rebuilt with 24-bit color transitions and a level select, on the reasoning that sales were earning them nothing anyway. Around the same stretch they put out three demos under the Hoi sAGA name, built partly by finding undocumented AGA chip registers through experiment because Commodore had not published the documentation.

~ moon child comes back ~

Moon Child was meant to be the one that worked. Started in 1993 as an Amiga AGA game, pitched to Psygnosis, it was abandoned when the budget ran out and Commodore went under, then rebuilt from 1995 for Windows at 640x480 and 60 frames a second in C++ and DirectX, which was a far higher resolution than games of that moment generally bothered with. It was nominated for an EMMA award at Cannes in September 1997 and published in the Netherlands on 4 October 1997. It never left the country, and Seven has explained why in plain terms: Valkieser had put heavy money into Philips CD-i authoring, the CD-i flopped, staff were fired and the publishing department was closed. In his words it marked the end of Team Hoi as an active game development team.

Nobody announced anything. There was no company to wind up and no last public word, and the three remaining members are still friends who message each other and go out to dinner. English Wikipedia's infobox gives the group a death year of 2003, which is an inference from the date of a later game two of them made at somebody else's company, and carries no citation.

The afterlife is the strange part. In April 2026 Seven sent the unfinished Amiga demo to the preservation site Games That Weren't, the theme music went around Bluesky, and a game that sold in one country in 1997 turned into a meme. Van Vliet then released the source: Moon Child on 19 April 2026, Hoi on 15 May, Clockwiser on 31 May, Digital Mugician in June, and he converted Hoi's original 68000 assembly into portable C so it runs on Windows and macOS. Twenty-nine years after the publisher's collapse stranded it, the work is finally out where anyone can have it, and this time it is free on purpose.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »