Wishing Well

The original Wishing Well

First of all it turned out that the rendered balls weren't animated in realtime. They were just pictures that were displayed by a BASIC program (so the BASIC part was true about the story).

And unfortunately it also didn't conquer the computer market by storm due to too litte advertisement and publicity and also because of the highly limited availabilty of the Archimedes on mainland Europe.

Another limitation of the Archimedes was the fact that the Acorn didn't allow for third-party hardware development and distribution. The Archimedes and all its hardware had to be bought from Acorn to the prices Acorn dictated. Therefore everything connected to the Acorn was very expensive compared to the growing PC market.

Anyway, I bought a used Acorn A310 in 1989 and first of all spent a lot of time playing vector graphics games and others. One of those other games was called "Cataclysm".

The story of the game went something like that you play a worker who has to redirect water, acid or other substance through a pipe system, so that the fluid just went to the designated sinks and tanks instead of going through the whole system and inflicting damage on wetness sensitive machinery. The fluid was displayed by thousands of bytes that came out of a pipe and were running down the screen and filled any gap they've come over.

I found this particular idea appealing and liked the way the water was being displayed. Even though animating hundredth or thousands of individuals bytes on the screen would take up a lot of calculation time I tried to create a CPC conversion of this idea.

This was how I had created the Wishing Well, even though I didn't really call it this way at first. Thriller invented the name when he had to integrate this part into "The Revenge Demo", since I had always called this program just "water.bin"...

It turned out that most people liked the 'Wishing Well' a lot and some even spent hours trying to get this or that basin to overflow. Marabu once told me that he has the feeling that the Wishing Well had some kind of hypnotic pacifying effect.

This demo also became part of the SYSCRASH asc production: "GOS Party 4 - The Revenge Demo" (Side 1, Part 6) since I lacked the motivation to create a mega demo myself.