The First Games

In-game screenshot

Quiz picture

FotisArts logo

Quiz picture

On November 1995, FotisArts started work on their first game, a picture-quiz game for the PC called Observer 96. It run on MS-DOS 6.2 and came in one 3.5 inch 1.44MB floppy disks. The purpose of the game was simple. A picture would appear on the screen, you would look at it for as long as you liked, pressed a key on the keyboard and answer a multiple choice question about something on that picture. When the question was asked the picture disappeared from the screen, so you had to rely on your observing skills to answer correctly.

The pictures were organized in four categories and the game had two difficulty settings. Normal and Hard. In Normal you had to choose between two possible correct answers where in Hard, you had to choose between four.

The game was completed in March 1996 and was released in the following month, receiving great acclaim. Although its release was limited in Athens, it sold quite well.

Observer 96 Info

Started : November 1995

Completed : March 1996

Released : April 1996

Designed & Programmed by Fotis Tyligadas

Additional Programming by

Kyriakos Nathanail

Platform : PC

OS : MS-DOS 6.2

Size : 1,3MB

The success of Observer 96 built a good momentum for the Team and the 1997 Enix game contest was the perfect opportunity to retain it. The big Japanese game company Enix Corporation (In 2003 the company merged with Square Co. forming Square Enix Co.) held an international game contest that year. John Tyligadas (one of FA’s First Six members) suggested taking part in the contest. The Team agreed and on July 1997 production on Dynamite Ball started.

Dynamite Ball was an arkanoid clone for the Windows PC platform. It had a plethora of changes from the standard bounce-the-ball-and-hit-the-bricks style, which made it unique among the dozens games of that type. There were no bonuses for hitting the bricks except for the Dynamite, each level had a particular set of lives available to complete it and the bricks had different bouncing patterns, to name a few.

The game was completed in December of 1997, twenty days before the closing date of the contest. The feedback FotisArts was receiving from people playing the beta version of the game during the last two months of production was very positive. In fact it was so good, that the Team eventually decided not to participate in the contest, since Enix would hold the copyrights to the game upon submission.

FotisArts itself, released the game on February of the following year (1998). It run on Windows 95 and came in three 3.5inch 1.44MB floppy disks. The game was a big success and even today, Dynamite Ball has many dedicated fans . In 2008, celebrating the 10th Anniversary of its release, FA created a new updated version that runs on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8 and distributed it as freeware.

Dynamite Ball is the last game ever released by FotisArts, to date.