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ORTHODoX was formed in 1990 (right after the so called Gentle Revolution here in Czech Republic). You can see faces of two base members in the ORTHODoX logo above (Stanislav is on the left and Radim is on the right side of logo). Those two men were working with Atari ST and noticed lack of quality games for people with monochrome monitors - games were created just for TV at that time. That's why ORTHODoX concentrated on games which worked on monochrome monitors only in resolution 640x400. Black background became an ORTHODoX standard, just like on this page. In the finishing phase of Leonid ORTHODoX needed some graphics and sound assembler routines so I (Joy) became the third member.
During forthcoming three years ORTHODoX released four great games, one good game and many small demos. All games and demos were written with our specific sense for humor (do you know that you can shoot in all our games?) and with great amount of irony to all that communist shit we had been living in for last 40 years. There's a lot of hidden allusions to everything coming from Soviet Union, Russia, red (=communistic) color etc. :-) in our games. This must be the reason why intelligent people like our games, I think.
Later those two base members left Atari scene. Since finishing University
we weren't worked together on any other project, so I am afraid there will
not be any new game, even if we were thinking on three new, very promising
titles.
All our games and demos were written in GFA Basic 3.5. Sound routines and some fast graphics effects (e.g. text scroll) were written in Devpac assembler. Our great games can use STE DMA sound, but play digital samples on older ST machines as well. Later, when I got a Falcon (1994) I patched some games to allow it work on bigger resolutions (640x480 or higher) properly.
We tried to sell our games originally, but we sold nearly nothing. On the other hand we found out our games had been pirated and sold by crackers. This is really interesting, especially when you take into account that we wanted just 50 Czech crowns (less than 3 DM!) for a game. From today onward our products become freeware, that means that all our games can be copied freely and must not be sold. This is all I can do for it...
By the way, all games are in Czech language, naturally. If you can't understand Czech, and don't want to learn it with our games, please forget to check DST (since it's a text-game) - other games might be interesting even for non-Czech speaking people, I believe.
Our game products (in chronological order):
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