Ten years of GG: What does...Guido Henkel do?
He played as a long-haired guitarist in punk and heavy metal bands in the early 1980s, learned the trade of typesetting on the side and wrote his first computer game (Hellowoon) in the middle of the same decade. Born in Stuttgart in 1964, Guido Henkel was always anything but conventional. This was not to change in 1990, when he - still long-haired - founded the developer studio Attic Entertainment Software in Albstadt with two school friends and celebrated his first commercial successes from 1992 to 1996 with the Nordland trilogy (Blade of Fate, Star Tail, Shadows over Riva) for the pen & paper role-playing game Das Schwarze Auge (The Black Eye).
Even before the completion of the economic simulation Ruler of the Seas at the end of 1997, Guido Henkel left Attic and Germany and signed on with Interplay in the USA. There he led the development of the roleplaying game Planescape Torment as producer, but also left this project before the release. Before that, however, he provided his masked face for the cover shooting of the game packaging, subsequently documented on guidohenkel.com. In 2002 Henkel founded G3 Studios and concentrated on mobile game programming. He also wrote stories based on John Sinclair's mystery-horror series Jason Dark - Ghost Hunter and ran the site dvdreview.com together with his wife.
Guido Henkel suffered perhaps his greatest professional defeat in the fall of 2013, when he failed in the wedding of the Kickstarter boom with a crowdfunding campaign for the role-playing game Deathfire - Ruins of Nethermore. Henkel was allowed to advertise his classic role-playing game to the game veterans and spoke of his classic role-playing game, which was intended to put the virtues of the DSA titles into a modern guise. You can listen to the interview in the third podcast on CHIP Power Play, which also failed in 2013 after four issues due to a lack of popularity. Even a second financing attempt by Deathfire, which was supposed to make it possible to publish the game in episode format, did not reach the targeted 50,000 US dollars. Two days before Christmas Eve 2013 Guido Henkel announced the end of the project of his G3 Studios.
With the exception of the publication of a few eBook non-fiction books, the years after the Deathfire bankruptcy were quiet around the Swabian. But since the announcement of the retro console Intellivision Amico, "Guy" Henkel is now increasingly making himself heard via Twitter. For the revival of Mattel's game console, originally produced between 1979 and 1990, Henkel is programming the firmware. Sales are scheduled to start in October 2020 and, in addition to the pre-installed revised classics, will offer a connection to the online store with additional games for 2.99 to 7.99 US dollars. More concrete information is to follow this October. No matter what Guido Henkel, now 55, has done over the years, one thing has not changed: his hair is still long.
Translated with
www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
