Meanwhile, Gol was being drawn into the music scene by applications such as Hammerhead and Rebirth 338. We even topped the Belgian game charts 4 years in a row with the CD version of a popular Belgian TV show called Blokken (a game based on Tetris). The rest of our developers continued on our other products like Fact2000 (invoicing software), E-OfficeDirect (a content-based web tool that was the precursor of EZGenerator). The game really shows off Gol’s coding and visual skills (remembering this was made in 1998). You can still download and check out the demo on our Eat This page. Sadly, this was the same time that games were all going 3D and so it went unnoticed. We decided to use Gol’s talent for something better and asked him to develop a platform game, Eat This.

It was a little gruesome then, pretty mild by today’s standards, but it that caused the rapper Ice-T to shout: “This game beats cocaine!”… after playing if for like half an hour on our booth at a show in Las Vegas. Gol’s first game for us was a Private Investigator. We immediately saw his talent and convinced him to come and work for us. The most important part wasn’t the win, but the fact we met a 19-year-old developer called Didier Dambrin (known as Gol by our customers).ĭidier not only won 1st prize in the ‘Game’ category but the overall ‘Grand prize’ too. As we didn’t have a lot of cash to spare we reworked an existing game, mailed it in, and won 1st prize in the multimedia category. We released a whole bunch of our CD ROMs including ‘Private Prison’ and ‘Private Castle”.Īround the same time, IBM held a “Da Vinci” contest where 1st prize included color laptops (which cost about $8000 back then). JMC writes: “This was the time CD-ROM games like ‘The 7th Guest’ started to appear and we decided to do a CD-ROM and teamed with ‘Private’, one of the bigger players in the over-18 games market. Surprisingly, this caught on and people asked for more.

The first thing they did was develop a Tetris game clone and offered it on floppy disks in the ‘little ads’ in Computer Magazine. If you thought Belgium was all Beer and Chocolates, then you may be surprised to learn Belgium is also the home of one of the world’s most successful music production applications FL STUDIO.Īfter doing more boring jobs (in stock market software & network solutions) Jean-Marie Cannie and Frank Van Biesen (company founders) wanted to have some more fun. Image-Line is a Belgium based software company, founded in 1994.

Fl studio pirate