| BUBBLE GHOST | |
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 Bubble Ghost is a French game by Christophe Andréani, originally released for the Atari ST in 1987.
On levels 4 and 15 you can see a wink to Mercenary, in one of the small paintings in the background. This has been removed from some other versions of the game, but seems there at least in the PC version too. Christophe Andréani kindly sent me a message about this (I am rephrasing a little): "before (and meanwhile and after) programming on the Atari ST, I played a few games to see what could be achieved on this machine. That's how I discovered Mercenary. I got hooked immediately. [...] It made me want to see more and then visit the various possible locations. [...]I chose to make this wink because I had been impressed. I found interesting the idea of advertising other games in my game. Like a game in the game to find all the hidden references. I must have been one of the first doing this, just for the fun, now in-games ads are common." - Thank you Mr Andréani! |
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| THE HELLION | |
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| The Hellion is an arcade game on Oric computers, released in 1984 by John Cumming, Gary Munroe, and Ian Marshall. It is filled with cultural references to early eighties: games or authors, TV shows and so on.
Among the 101 levels, one of them is called 'Encounter'. The player has to shoot at lozenges that look very much like Novagen's Encounter explosions! |
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| INSIDE MERCENARY GAMES | |
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| All Mercenary 1 players know the Author's Advert for Encounter, released 1 year before. But, by hex-editing the executable file of Mercenary 3 for Atari ST, I found this sentence... Encounter for 16-bits computers had been released a few months before Mercenary 3: is this another (hidden, this time?) advert for Encounter? | |