From Richard Soberka:
Hi everyone,
With a touch of nostalgia, I wanted to mark the 40th anniversary of the release of my video game Pleins Gaz for the Apple II.
It’s an action game combining motorcycle obstacle racing and shooting, which I developed between May and August 1986.
(I wrote several thousand lines of 6502 assembly code and created all the graphics by hand, pixel by pixel. As a little anecdote, people often criticized the fact that there was no rider on the motorcycle. But that was simply because all my attempts to draw one were unsuccessful: it just didn’t look good!)
In September of that same year, I traveled to Paris to meet with the publisher Froggy Software, where I signed a publishing agreement.
Production and distribution of the game began in the weeks that followed.
By the end of 1986, Pleins Gaz was available at most French Apple retailers of the time, as well as FNAC stores throughout France.
I believe I was one of the few French developers to create an arcade game for the Apple II, at a time when French game development for this computer was primarily focused on adventure games.
For those who would like to discover or rediscover Pleins Gaz, I’ve made a ZIP archive available on my personal website containing a disk image in .DSK format, an exact copy of the original 1986 version 1.0.
https://www.soberka.com/games/#pleins-gaz
40 years later, Pleins Gaz still runs perfectly on Apple II emulators, as well as, of course, on all original Apple II computers with 64 KB of memory.
Enjoy!
Richard
