Weltenschmiede

» see weltenschmiede.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Harald Evers and Andreas Niedermeier set up Weltenschmiede in Munich in 1990, and in the same year they shipped Das Stundenglas through the distributor Software 2000. It is remembered in Germany because almost nothing else in its category is. The text adventure was an English-language form that mostly arrived translated or not at all, and a parser written for German, a language that builds words by gluing them together and moves the verb around the sentence, is a harder machine to make work than the Infocom one.

They made it work well enough to keep going. The graphic artist Werner Frankowsky joined in 1991 for Die Kathedrale. In 1992 Hexuma came third among adventures in the Amiga Joker game of the year poll, which in the German Amiga scene of that moment was a real placement. Then in 1994 the studio did what everybody did and left the parser behind: Die Höhlenwelt-Saga shipped with a point-and-click interface, and the prose that used to be the entire interface became flavor text instead.

Niedermeier eventually moved over to Software 2000 to program, and from that point Weltenschmiede was mostly a design shop that bought its programming in from outside. Evers drifted toward writing. The Höhlenwelt material became a fantasy novel cycle that ran to eight volumes and reached more readers than any of the games had.

~ the case file ~

~ inside one language ~

The text adventure had stopped being a commercial form before there was a modem in my house, and the few I could get at were English and parked on abandonware sites. A parser game written in German, sold in German shops to German Amiga owners, was never going to travel as far as Ankara.

The language is the whole economics of this studio. Nothing was localized outward, and the traffic ran the other way: by the turn of the century the banner on weltenschmiede.de was advertising localization and translation work alongside the games. The single foreign title in the catalog is Dragonfire: The Well of Souls in 2000, and Weltenschmiede's job on that one was the German version. Sixteen years of work served an audience that fit inside one country, which is how the studio stayed open while the genre folded everywhere else.

~ down to three ~

By the mid 2000s only three people were left. Two of them were Evers and a programmer called Gerhard Hoops. The third was Evers' teenage son, who contributed graphics and ideas. In 2005 Evers published a collectible card game called Trivocum, set in the Höhlenwelt world, and in July of that year Weltenschmiede released it as a downloadable computer game that kept getting expanded. Hoops wrote the code, Evers handled the design and the artwork, and new cards went on arriving for as long as there was somebody to draw them.

~ the day it died ~

Harald Evers died of a heart attack on 30 November 2006. He was forty-nine, and the last three volumes of the saga were unwritten. The Amiga scene found out slowly, the way it found out about everything by then: amiga-news.de ran the notice on 4 February 2007, more than two months after the fact, under a headline that listed the three games people would recognize.

The rights to the Weltenschmiede games went to the Bavarian state government and have sat there ever since. There are more ordinary ways for a small catalog to become unbuyable, and most of them involve a liquidator. This one involves a regional authority holding the deeds to five adventure games in a language almost nobody emulates in.

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