Team Hoi (originally Soft Eyes) was a Dutch team of video game developers that was active from the 1980s to the 2000s. It was formed by and consisted of graphics artist Metin Seven, programmers Reinier van Vliet and Pieter Opdam, and composer Ramon Braumuller. The team developed many games in the 1980s and 1990s, including Hoi, Cognition, Clockwiser, and Moon Child.
History Growing up in Bussum, Metin Seven (born in Brussels, Belgium) developed an interest in films, music and comics. In 1985, he was part of a Commodore 64 demoscene group called the Bithacker Cracking Team (BCT).Bithacker Demo, Bithacker Cracking Team, 1985.Mutants Muzix, Bithacker Cracking Team, 1987. In 1987, Seven got in contact with Reinier van Vliet (born on 28 August 1971), a programmer in Alphen aan den Rijn, through Arnold van der Veen Meerstadt, who responded to a newspaper advertisement where Seven offered his Amiga 1000 for sale to buy the then-recently released Amiga 2000. As early Amiga owners, Veen Meerstadt and Seven stayed in touch, and the former went to high school with Van Vliet and Pieter Opdam, who were already programming games for the Amiga. Van Vliet had already developed several internationally-released games by then, such as the Amiga game Bouncer, published by Diamond Software in 1987. Seven's experience of playing Commodore 64 games like Impossible Mission inspired him to become a game designer. He was looking for people to form a team, and wrote a letter to Van Vliet about it. Van Vliet and Opdam agreed, and they, along with Seven and Naarden-based composer Ramon Braumuller (born on 7 January 1972), formed a team named Electronic Audio Recordings (E.A.R.),Musicdemo, Electronic Audio Recordings, 1989. aiming to produce music for computer games using their self-made music editor, SIDmon. The team was later renamed Soft Eyes (also written as "SoftEyes"). Seven came up with the name, which was a pun on "soft ice" and a reference to visually appealing graphics, and inspired by other game developers using "soft" (from "software") in their names. Seven and Van Vliet travelled to London on weekends to establish contact with British publishers, including Ocean Software, Elite Systems, and Hewson Consultants, at the Personal Computer World Show and European Computer Trade Show. Seven sent letters and demo diskettes to potential foreign publishers, since there was no game publisher in the Netherlands at that time. However, they learned that the publishers were looking for developers of completed games in addition to music, so they became a game development team.
In addition to developing their first games, Seven, Van Vliet and Braumuller were also active as members of the Amiga demogroup The Digital Force International (DFI), creating a popular series of a cappella raps in the form of tracker modules in Protracker, composed of vocal sound samples.Ode To Ramon 2, Digital Force International, July 29, 1989. In 1990, Seven worked at Radarsoft, designing graphics for a Philips video wall at the Firato expo in the RAI Amsterdam, and Sleutelpositie ("Key Position"), a custom-made MS-DOS game for one of Radarsoft's clients. The assignments were managed by Cees Kramer and mediated by the Amsterdam-based agency Comic House. Seven worked at Comic House's studio on Mannetje and Mannetje, based on the photo comic of the same name by Hanco Kolk and Peter de Wit and broadcast on VPRO's Villa Achterwerk block from 1990 to 1994. He also created a Christmas greeting video with Wilbert Plijnaar, another artist at Comic House.
Ragnov In 1988, Soft Eyes were developing their first Amiga game named Ragnov, a maze-based game in which the player was to control a character navigating a multi-directional scrolling environment using a jetpack. Ragnov had a split-screen multiplayer mode. They distributed a demo version of the game to several publishers. At the time, software distribution was done by copying floppy disks at meetings, sending them by mail, and via bulletin board systems. However, the game was canceled when Van Vliet lost all his source files due to a backup accident. Soft Eyes decided not to restart Ragnov and began development of Venom Wing in 1989. The game's concept was later repurposed for Hoi and Moon Childs third levels in 1992 and 1997, respectively, where the titular characters each use a jetpack to fly.
SIDmon and Digital Mugician
Soft Eyes also developed two Amiga music editors in the late 1980s, initially for use in their own games: SIDmon, named after the Commodore 64's Sound Interface Device audio chip, and Digital Mugician.
SIDmon was the first music editor for the Amiga to use synthethised sounds alongside sound samples, the former of which consumed much less RAM than the latter, making SIDmon very useful for composing music in games. Seven wrote the manual for the editor. SIDmon was published in 1989 by the German company Turtle Byte, who never paid any royalties for it. Seven and Van Vliet travelled to the Ami Expo in Cologne to approach Turtle Byte regarding the unpaid compensation, but this led to nothing. In 1991, Turtle Byte published an unauthorized second instalment of SIDmon with the help of programmer Michael Kleps (also known as "Unknown") from the demogroup Doctor Mabuse Orgasm Crackings. Digital Mugician, which was more technically and visually refined compared to SIDmon, was published in 1990 by Thalamus Ltd. Seven wrote the manual for Digital Mugician and made some refinements to its user interface, developed by Van Vliet. Version 2 of Digital Mugician featured a technique that allowed the four channels of the Amiga's Paula audio chip to be expanded with three extra channels using the 68000 CPU. This was achieved without the audible loss of quality associated with splitting the four Amiga audio channels. The only other Amiga music editor that utilized the 7-channel technique was Chris Hülsbeck's TFMX editor, used to compose the music of Turrican II: The Final Fight, among others.
Soft Eyes initially used SIDmon and later Digital Mugician to compose the music in their games. Following its release, Digital Mugician was also used by other game developers, such as Codemasters for The Quest of Agravain. Digital Mugician was reviewed by the Dutch Amiga Magazine for its June/July 1991 issue. Many years later in 1998, Van Vliet developed a third music editor named Syntrax (also known as Jaytrax), released for Windows, Pocket PC and Symbian in the early 2000s. Syntrax used the improved hardware to generate more synthesised sounds. Seven designed graphics for the intro.
Venom Wing Soft Eyes finished developing their shoot 'em up game Venom Wing (also spelled Venomwing and initially called Hawkind), and managed to attract the interest of Thalamus, which released the game worldwide in 1990. Oliver Frey was commissioned to do the cover and advertising artwork. The Games Machine gave Venom Wing a score of 80%.
Borobodur: The Planet of Doom In 1992, Soft Eyes developed Borobodur: The Planet of Doom, released by Thalamus. It was one of the last games in which Van Vliet and Opdam would collaborate together, the other being a racing game named Bump 'N' Burn, published by Grandslam Interactive in 1994. Opdam would leave to work at Team17, where he would work on the Worms series.
Hoi In 1990, Soft Eyes began development on Hoi, which was released for the Amiga in the summer of 1992, by Hollyware Entertainment in the United States and Software Business in Europe. Hoi received positive reception from various international computer magazines, including The One, which gave the game a score of 90%. Around the time of the game's release, Soft Eyes, now renamed Team Hoi, was interviewed on national television in Club Veronica.
After a US$ 200 advance, Hollyware promised that the next transfer would follow soon, but stopped paying royalties to Team Hoi. The developers decided to release a special freeware remix version for the AGA Amiga system range in 1993.
Peanutbutter Power Game In 1992, Amsterdam-based agency Top Drawers commissioned Team Hoi to develop a computer game for Ogilvy & Mather, which had been hired by Calvé and Unilever. The game, titled Peanutbutter Power Game, was the first Dutch computer game made specifically for marketing and promotional purposes. Because of the game's tight deadline, Team Hoi used the sprites of the titular character of their later game Moon Child as a template for the game's protagonist, Benny. A commercial was produced and filmed in a studio in Amsterdam, marking the debut of a young Lieke van Lexmond in the role of Anja, the girl playing the game. Van Vliet and Seven attended the shooting of the commercial, and played the game off-screen instead of Van Lexmond and the child actor playing Benny, whom Seven later stated was forgetting his lines out of nervousness. The Peanutbutter Power Game was played by children on the television programme Telekids, where players could win their height in stacked jars of Calvé peanut butter. Van Vliet and Seven attended the filming of the programme to boot up the game live for the children from the Amiga Assembler. The source code was later lost due to a backup accident.
In 2018, the game was included in the national Dutch Games Canon.
Hoi sAGA In early 1993, Team Hoi released the first two parts of a demo trilogy named Hoi sAGA for the new generation of AGA Amigas, Planet Groove and Mindwarp. At the time, Commodore had not yet published documentation for the AGA chipset, and wanted to encourage developers to use the Amiga's operating system instead of programming the hardware directly. Van Vliet discovered new chip registers through experimentation and utilised them in the demos, such as an expanded "dual-playfield" mode with more bitplanes. The third part, The Final Chapter, was planned to be released at The Party, but was not completed in time and was later released in January 1994 instead.
Cognition and Clockwiser In 1994, Team Hoi developed two puzzle games, Cognition and Clockwiser. Cognition was published by Divo, the Dutch publisher of Amiga Magazine, STart, and later MacFan, while Clockwiser was published by Rasputin Software for the Amiga, MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows, the latter receiving positive reception from international computer magazines. CU Amiga gave Clockwiser a score of 82%. The MS-DOS and Windows versions were programmed by Peter Schaap. Rasputin failed to pay Team Hoi any royalties, despite the developers' formal demands.
Moon Child In late 1991, Seven created the first concept designs for a small elf, who would become the protagonist for Team Hoi's next game, Moon Child. In 1992–1993, Team Hoi began developing Moon Child as an unofficial sequel to Hoi. The game is a 2D side-scrolling action-platformer set in a science fiction–fantasy world, in which Moon Child is tasked with saving the planet Utopia from a destructive techno-virus. The player controls Moon Child to guide him through four environmental worlds, each containing multiple themed levels. Moon Child avoids hazards and enemies while collecting "Dark Diamonds", 77 out of 84 of which are required to progress to the final level of the game.