The fourth interviewee in the Gothic Alpha interview series is Golden Master Team member Flatczer. He even told us about the early versions of… Arcania. In the article, you’ll see footage of one of these alpha versions, and you’ll also learn more about the story behind the creation of this game. Which was not at all meant to be a sequel to the third part.
Interview
1. How did it come about that you took up researching early versions of Gothic? Was gaining as much information as possible an end in itself, or were you driven by other intentions?
Until 2017, I had never been an active participant in the Gothic community. I played mods, looked at content related to the game, but nothing more. It was around this time that I came across Dmitri’s1 video on YouTube. I was extremely surprised by what I saw. At the time, I knew nothing about Gothic’s alpha, apart from a few screenshots I had seen.
We talked to him through YouTube comments until he suggested switching to WoP2. And I’ve since created an account there. I don’t have an account there now, but at the time I was creating quite a few different topics that were mostly about the alpha version or lore of Gothic. There I met Horatio and PanGur and other friends of Dima3, who were working on Golden Master not long before. Dmitri invited me to help him with his project The Lost Sequel4 and I agreed. The project was frozen and PanGur offered me to join the Golden Master Team5 and work on Golden Master 2 (in the future Nemesis6). Here’s a brief history.
As for the goal. Well, I guess it was important for all of us to find new alpha versions, but I always took a much simpler approach and was more attracted by the excitement of the search than the result. Dmitri and others were fascinated by the mystery behind these versions. There were many legends circulating in the community about the alpha versions and they wanted to confirm them. I didn’t feel such feelings.
I would say that there is a certain vibe in the alpha versions that attracts people. That atmosphere, the underdog feel. You see a game that you know absolutely everything about, but at the same time your brain subconsciously notices minor inconsistencies. You see dialogues that were never there, you notice a slightly different balance. Like it’s a dream and not a real game. It evokes emotion. I had the intrusive thought of realising this content as a mod, as if it were an alternative world where the story of the game took a completely different path. To a large extent, Nemesis became such a project.
2. On the Gothic Archive website, on which we can find the most informations about the previous versions of Gothic, or on another sites, you can read mainly about the versions like 0.56c, 0.64b, 0.94k, 1.00b and the most often about 1.12f, i.e. Sequel.
Why just those versions are so interesting? By numering convention we can deduce, that there were a lot of more of them.
These versions are interesting primarily because they are the only versions we have and can “play”. The point is that we basically only got the demo versions for journalists, so that much of the content completed at the time was cut out to reduce the size of the game on disk.
Quite possibly there are other versions. Incidentally, you didn’t list them all; in addition to 0.56c, 0.64b, 0.94k and 1.00b there were 1.01d, 1.01e (there’s also 1.04d, but if I’m not mistaken it was already available as a public demo). There’s also Finster and the sequel, but that’s a bit different.
Interestingly, 0.56c and 0.64b were also called Demo3 and Demo5 respectively. This mildly suggests that there should have been at least Demo1, Demo2 and Demo4. And indeed they did exist, but they have either been lost forever or remain non-public. We have researched the issue of versions very thoroughly and there are even very detailed documents listing their contents and features.
This was basically handled by Dmitri, but during the search for the alpha version we fell into the hands of extremely detailed changelogs, through which we confirmed many of our assumptions and also learned many new things. However, these changelogs have not been kept since the first version, so there are gaps in them.
The most interesting versions to get are 0.74 (the 2000 version of the trailer), 0.81 and maybe Demo1 (the version with graphics for PS17; there’s a lot of unique stuff in there). Also, I’d personally be interested in getting some footage from the time of the v0.06 version of the engine. It’s hard to call it an alpha version at all, because at that time there was essentially just a very crude engine and no playability whatsoever. But there were early renders of the locations and they are quite interesting.
It’s unlikely we’ll ever get a full-fledged alpha build that wasn’t intended for journalists. Although I’m pretty sure it hasn’t been lost forever.
3. You make a research of the previous versions of Gothic 1. Will you research Gothic 2 as well? There are a bit materials about Gothic 2 Pre-Alpha on Gothic Archive; some of them appeared also because of 20th anniversary of Gothic II.
But there are significantly less materials than in case of Gothic 1. For example there is not – at least I didn’t find – the informations about the previous versions of Gothic 2, or press demos. It looks like, that the history of creating of Gothic 2 is a lot of less interesting for Gothic fans.
I think the alpha versions of Gothic 2 are less popular for two reasons.
Firstly, all the alpha version researchers I know (and virtually everyone interested in alpha versions) are fans of Gothic 1, myself included. Some simply prefer Gothic 1, and some think Gothic 2 is simply inferior. This may seem surprising to most fans, but Gothic 1 and Gothic 2 are really very different games, and their fans are somewhat divided. Of course, this boundary is blurred, but it exists.
I think the alpha version researchers are G1 fans because the alpha versions of Gothic 2 are almost finished G1 with improvements. There’s not the same atmosphere, there’s not something that clearly stands out from the original, the mystery is missing. Of course, the alpha versions of G2 have their own special atmosphere, which makes me curious about Bloody’s project to recreate the alpha versions of G2. But it’s still a bit different.
Secondly, Gothic 2 has practically no alpha versions, and the ones that do exist are much less different from the original than G1. Gothic 2 was developed over a year, while Gothic 1 was developed over 4 years, and in that time the plot, design and gameplay changed many times. This was not the case with G2. Perhaps Sequel can to some extent be considered an alpha version of G2, but I am rather inclined to consider it a proto-G2. It is, after all, a separate product that largely served as the basis for the future G2.
As for working on the alpha version of G2, I don’t know. To be honest, I’m a bit tired of it, but I always follow any updates and am interested in alpha versions of any part of Gothic. G2, admittedly, to a lesser extent than Gothic 3, or even Arcania (perhaps surprisingly, but Arcania has its own little community of alpha version researchers, and there is indeed something to research there).
We tried to find something related to G2, but everything we found is in the G28 archive. These are screenshots, music, a few magazine articles and some journalistic announcements. Surprisingly, there are no playable versions.
4. Publishing Gothic Sequel is named as “a leak”. So it is described as published against someone will. Despit this, THQ Nordic didn’t lead to remove it from Internet. What consequences had the publication of Gothic Sequel, besides that anybody can play it?
The sequel “leaked” at a “convenient” time. Perhaps if the first leak had happened in our time, THQ Nordic’s reaction would have been completely different. Actually, I don’t know why THQ Nordic is not reacting in any way to all the intrigue around the alpha version. Even approaching them directly with questions, we received no response.
However, the Sequel leak has had its consequences. It set a precedent that, on the one hand, created a buzz around the subject of the alpha version (which up to that point was, it seemed, marginal) and, on the other, changed the attitude of those who had some material. For almost 20 years, none of the disc holders ever came forward. We didn’t even know they existed. In just a few years we already have a whole set of these alpha versions and there is no telling how many more we will get in the future.
But I’m not going to justify the leak of Sequel and 1.01 versions. There are some very unpleasant people behind these events and this is clearly a breach. The conspiracy theory principle is at work with the alpha versions. The more people know about the conspiracy, the faster the conspiracy becomes public property.
5. Nemesis will be based on a specific alpha version of Gothic? Or will it be more of a composite of content from different periods of Gothic’s development, when it looked much different than the version released by Piranha Bytes? And will we start the adventure as Nameless in a location from the Nemesis Prologue?
Nemesis was not based on specific alpha versions. Initially, we had ideas to make it “close” to the known alpha versions. However, the idea of reconstructing these versions was eventually abandoned. We wanted to create something more original, but with preservation and reinterpretation of the old Piranha ideas.
Therefore, the world was based on Ralf’s (Marczinczik) concepts and the plot was based on Mike’s (Hoge) sketches and Wittmann’s book10 (although the plot largely deviated from these sources anyway). We had many variants of the script and many of them were quite strange.
There will be no Nameless Hero in Nemesis. The main character of the mod is more based on Stomp from Wittmann’s story. We had a little mod called “The Pit”. On Steam, it’s called Nemesis Prologue and it was created back when the main character was Nameless. This mod was a sort of “chapter 0”. However, in the end, its whole role was to show some new mechanics. Now, it has no connection with Nemesis and in a sense has become a separate mod.
Firstly, it was originally planned to be something different. The terrain and the story itself about the Nameless One in den11 were originally not related to Nemesis and it was only during the development of the mod that we decided to make it part of the storyline. Secondly, now the plot has changed, so this mod can be seen as a mini-prequel to the original Bezi story.
Currently, the mechanics shown in that mod look quite primitive compared to what they are now. Largely due to the change in concept and our initial inexperience, Nemesis has become a ‘long-term project’. But this is a classic problem for most enthusiasts.
6. I was surprised to see that alpha versions of Arcania are also being explored. Did any of the previous versions, deserve to be called part of the Gothic series? Even after the release, the name ‘Gothic’ was removed from the title by the developers themselves. Did you also work on the alphas of Arcania?
Probably not. Not many think about it, but Arcania was never meant to be a sequel to Gothic. JoWood felt that Arcania would be their new game series that would lose its connection to Gothic, leaving them with the right to create a sequel despite the agreement that they only had the right to do a G3 add-on, a mobile game, one full-fledged part and an add-on to that.
That’s why it was initially called Gothic 4 Genesis, and then ArcaniA: A Gothic Tale. In the situation with Arcania, I feel a bit sorry for the developers, because they really wanted to make a new Gothic, and there were fans among them who loved the series, and some of them were even involved in modding the game at the beginning of their careers. Almost no one is talking about the alpha version of Arcania, but it really can match G1 in terms of its story.
I’ve seen enthusiasts on the forums researching early screenshots and footage, but almost all of them are from 2009-2010. In our time, apart from me, only Drurhang (lead developer of The Lost Sequel) has been interested in the alpha version of Arcania. He’s also doing the Gothic 4 2.012 mod. Initially, Arcania was very different from what was eventually created.
Most of the content from the alpha version consisted of a heavily truncated storyline for the game. Originally, Arcania’s storyline was to take place on 4 islands: Feshyr, Argaan, Torgaan and Korshaan. Korshaan is of particular interest because it was an island covered by a magical barrier where lizard people lived. It has also not escaped notice that, in fact, the entire ‘Fall of Setarrif’ expansion was largely inspired by the plot of the Gothic Sequel. Especially if you look at the material of the add-on before the release of Arcania (the add-on was originally supposed to be part of the game, but was cut and reworked before the release).
You might also note that Arcania had a fully open world with mounts. And that there were more elaborate character development mechanics and RPG systems. Last year we somehow managed to get our hands on one of the old Arcania builds. So far I don’t know who made it available, but even in that build, which wasn’t much different from the original, there was still an interface for interacting with the alchemy table, as well as some very funny dubbing from the developers. If you want, I can show gameplay from this version.
Who knows, maybe if circumstances had turned out differently, Arcania could have become a nice sequel. We know that probably some of the ideas for the fourth part were conceived by Piranha Bytes while they were still working on G3 and were realised in Arcania, and the developers even mentioned that they have a certain ‘book of all Gothic lore’, where the world is described, almost from prehistoric times in the most detailed way.
This book is still kept with one of the creators of Arcania (if I’m not mistaken, it’s from Russia). Few people also know that Arcania was originally called another project, unrelated to Gothic. Almost nothing is known about the “original” Arcania, but it is likely that the names of the southern islands come from there.
7. Are you also following the development of Gothic Remake? Have you noticed the developers implementing Gothic Alpha content in it? The creators of Gothic 1 didn’t manage to implement all their ideas, the creation of the Remake seems like the perfect opportunity to implement them.
Yes, without a doubt. I even played a demo of Nyras at Gamescom this year. The remake interests me, despite the scepticism of some of my friends. But I understand their dissatisfaction. I myself also criticised the gameplay and visual solutions shown, but only from the perspective of how I think the design could be improved. In any case, before I talk about whether this is a worthy reinterpretation of Gothic, I should play it, right? I’m still looking at it with optimism. Even if I don’t like the remake, it will attract new blood either way.
As for implementing the ideas from the alpha version in the remake, I can see that the developers know them and want to implement them. At least we saw an abandoned mine, which is already good. But to me, as someone deeply immersed in the history of the game, it’s apparent that this is not the main focus. And a lot of really cool ideas (especially from Wittmann’s story) will unfortunately remain unattended. I’d like to believe I’m wrong, but in any case I don’t judge the developers for prioritising otherwise. It’s their game.
SUmmary
Flatczer took up researching the early versions after coming across one of Alpha Researcher’s recordings. However, unlike previous interviewees in our series, he was more interested in the accompanying emotions than the result. These even led him to look into early builds of Arcania. He also stated that the creators of Arcania had mentioned that they had a “book of all Gothic lore”, where the game world is described in minute detail. I’m probably not the only one who wishes that, like the previously forgotten book “Sleeper’s Ban”, this book too would become publicly available.
Another enthusiast of the series is more interested than the Gothic Alpha material itself in why the developers decided to create Gothic the way they did. This requires him to analyse a number of cultural works. He is Avallach, involved in the Phoenix project.
- That is, the previous interviewee – ed. ↩︎
- It stands for World of Players RU, which is the largest Russian forum about Gothic. ↩︎
- Diminutive of “Dmitri‘”. ↩︎
- Link to thread about the frozen project Gothic: The Lost Sequel: https://worldofplayers.ru/threads/41014/ ↩︎
- The group’s VKontakte page: https://vk.com/gothic1gm ↩︎
- Link to thread about the Nemesis project: https://worldofplayers.ru/threads/41740/ ↩︎
- Play Station 1 ↩︎
- G2 Pre Alpha Material: https://gothicarchive.org/postrelease/gothic2/ ↩︎
- This is an edited graphic from Gothic Archive. ↩︎
- Alexander Wittmann. ↩︎
- In Nemesis: Prologue, Nameless is locked in a pit. It is possible that this is a representation of the dungeon in which Kirgo from Gothic 1 spent almost two months. ↩︎
- Link to thread about the modification: https://worldofplayers.ru/threads/39793 ↩︎
