Games Thirst – Amazing Life
For 28 years the Berlin Wall separated the people of Germany’s capital, limiting the socialist East’s access to the media and technologies West Germans took for granted. In East Berlin, up-to-date computer hardware was uncommon, making gaming a hobby for only the most ardent enthusiasts, but software was cracked and traded by pirates. In a sense, Yager was born from East Berlin’s piracy scene, but piracy was a response to scarcity, and it was scarcity that had the most profound effect on Yager’s founders and the city they call home.
“I think that’s why there are so few developers in Berlin today,” says Yager’s managing director, Timo Ullmann. “When Germany was still divided, there was a division in access to technology and Berlin never had a chance to become a hotspot for this kind of entertainment.”
Of Yager’s five founders, only one grew up outside the city and none on the western side of the Wall. IT director Roman Golka, creative director Uwe Beneke, director of development Philipp Schellbach and Ullmann all attended computer clubs in East Germany, where they played pirate copies of the Commodore 64 games that made it across the divide. Later, they learned their programming skills cracking games, as well as on the demo scene under the name Dynamic Technologies, or ‘Dytec’. “You can still see our intro on YouTube, I think,” Schellbach says. “Any pirate fan will know them!”
“It was always cracked games in East Berlin,” says Ullmann. “And so there was a point when we got curious about how we’d crack them ourselves, and then a point when we became curious about how we would make them ourselves. When the Wall fell, we visited the famous Chaos Computer Club, but their agenda was very different to ours – they were about hacking and breaking security, and we were more into the idea of using technology to entertain people with music or games or demos.”
The computer clubs in East Berlin had created a generation of hackers and crackers, with the desire, though not necessarily the tools, they needed for success when the east/west border opened in November 1989. “Philipp and Roman and I had worked on a couple of demos for small C64 games,” says Ullmann. “We had a shoot ’em up, a rip-off of Bomberman and even some self-created hardware so we could play it with four joysticks. We offered the demos to some West German publishers and they were kind enough to write back and say, you know, ‘We like what you did, but we don’t sell C64 any more.’ We should have moved on to Amiga and PC, but C64 was pretty much all we knew in East Berlin. Uwe, our creative director, was an Atari guy… but the rest of us were programming in assembler on C64. I think it taught us a lesson; even back then, we realised how important it was to push as far as you can when you’re working with very limited computing power.”
Spec Ops: The Line.
In the Eastern Bloc, games were a tiny part of a computing industry where utility was valued over entertainment, but the fall of the Wall opened the door for the four friends to study computer sciences at Humboldt University with a mind to making games. All bar Schellbach would drop out to work on shooter Yager in 1998.
“We didn’t think about what we might be doing ten years from now,” says Ullmann. “We saw more future in the game than in the study. We were working on a prototype and meeting once a week at my flat when a friend of mine introduced us to Mathias [Wiese].”
