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[Optical Brothers]
[Quick Commander]
[mc-zx]
Archive:
[Group history]
[Our games]
[Always]
["OBS" news (in Russian)]
Over its long and fruitful life the Optical Brothers group has managed to grow a thick crust of
legends, gossip and superstitions. Many pagan rites are known for certain to exist, meant to
appease the opticalists, win their favour and talk them into giving you a job. No wonder,
then, that the very story of how the group came into the world is tangled and contradictory, depending on who tells it.
Even the members of Optical Brothers themselves often clash in verbal battles on the topics "What is OB?", "When
do we get paid?" and "When is Spectre's birthday?". Here is an attempt to collect
the various opinions on the origins of OB from the opticalists themselves and finally put an end
to this tangled but extremely interesting story.
So, story number one, from me.
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The Optical Brothers group was founded in 1998 by 3 people with extraordinary minds and
a view of life unclouded by logic. The newborn group was quickly headed by Filosof:
its ideological inspiration, the guru of the optical movement, a supporter of expanding o.b. to the east, and simply
a man of great promise as a seasoned opticalist. On Filosof's bare enthusiasm alone
the group could have lasted for centuries and taken a worthy place in history, had it not been for
the creative zeal of such personalities as Mentat and Spectre. Mentat, with the makings (or the rudiments?) of
a drawing talent, and Spectre, with a modest wish to make it (or to fake it?) as a coder. The first result of their
creative zeal was the game Any Tank, released after lengthy experiments in the
OB laboratories involving large quantities of beer. The game was undoubtedly a success, as proven by its 2.5 loyal fans who every year
launch it to set new records. And since in those days Minsk had more Spectrum groups than Spectrum users ;),
in order to focus our efforts on one field Spectre made the final decision to quit ZX Legion, and Mentat to quit ASD.
After that, having tasted freedom, all the members of OB zealously set about conquering the peaks
of the Spectrum (the lowlands we had already conquered). But... Then what happened happened...
A sharp turn in the group's history was the departure of the founder of optical brutalism,
Filosof, the man who with an iron hand steered the thoughts and desires of all OB members in the right
direction. Filosof's departure left us in shock, but once we had overcome the panic we realised that we could
bear this blow of fate with dignity: luckily, the seeds of optical brutalism had already been sown in our
minds. In those hard times our orderly ranks were swiftly burst into by One Man, a man with a sober
view of the world and a professional view of Art Studio and Pro Tracker. Then we understood that the trouble
had passed us by (we even saw which group it went off to), and in solidarity with the starving of Africa
we released the first game of the new line-up: Chainick: Horror in Flat. A game that was written as our
answer to Chamberlain (that is, to Chainick) and became so popular we didn't know where to hide from it, so we urgently
started work on a new project, Clickmania, into which we poured
all our latest achievements in coding, graphics and music.
Alongside the games, OB members were busy with their "solo" projects. Mentat became famous
in the field of journalism with his own Fenzin newspapers, which later grew into something bigger: a website
on the internet, www.Fenzin.ru,
devoted to science fiction and fantasy. Spectre shone at writing viewers for the huge number of
newspapers coming out at the time, published his own newspaper Lprint, made all sorts of system software, until he
settled down to developing Quick Commander, which he is still doing to this day. And One Man is famous for
his unrivalled skill at layin' tiles (phone number below) ;) and became renowned for managing to write a PC Emulator in BASIC 8-). But the
rank-and-file members of OB rightly consider their greatest success to be the fruit of joint efforts to bring our ideas to the masses: the newspaper
Always. During its short but stormy life the newspaper stood out with its unconventional approach to covering the news
of the Spectrum crowd, and so it became the foundation of this site. That is, the section with the news of the
"Odna Baba Skazala" agency on our site can be considered the successor of Always, as anyone who read Always and has now
visited that section can see for themselves.
Many historians lean towards the view that Spectre's version of the history matches
reality most closely, citing as proof the invariably high rating of Spectre himself within the group. But
there are also followers of orthodox schools of interpreting OB history, for example, the story of the group's
origins according to One Man.
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Spectre was born in the city of Phnom Penh (Cambodia), where he lived until he got his first
Spectrum-compatible computer, the "Muana-128" (the Cambodian version of the Pentagon), on which he wrote
his first viewer for the newspaper Lumumbara News. He then wrote several more versions of viewers,
which in a short time spread among the hands of Cambodian Spectrum users. Just
a year later Spectre was taking part in programming olympiads, where, to the envy of his enemies, he took
all the prizes. It was at one of these olympiads that he met Filosof, a Cambodian
businessman well known at the time, who noticed the boy's talent and offered to found a software company with him
developing text viewers. Spectre agreed, and just two weeks later the company S&F began developing
its first viewer. All would have been fine, except that Cambodia was not a good market for selling
the company's products. After the failure of the first viewer, Spectre and Filosof decided to move for good to a small
European country, Belarus, where at the time nearly every other Spectrum user published his own newspaper
and therefore needed viewers. In those days the Belarusian viewer market was "run" by a certain STURM/ZX-LEGION.
From under his pen came many publications, mostly of the entertainment kind. Seeing the rapid growth
of the company founded by Spectre and Filosof, Sturm offered them cooperation in exchange for a guarantee
that they would live to a happy old age, and naturally the lads could not refuse such a tempting
offer. Just four days later Spectre laid before Sturm a working version of the viewer for
the newspaper Energy. Then, for a year, the lads worked for ZX-LEGION, until they noticed discord and liberal
moods among the legionaries. Within a few days Spectre realised that ZX-LEGION was
just a world someone had made up, which, like the Titanic under its own weight, was slowly but surely
going to the bottom. Filosof and Spectre announced they were leaving the legion and, to everyone's surprise, Sturm let them
go. The Optical Brothers group was formed in no time, but, fearing trouble,
the lads switched to making games. Even before work began on Any Tank, the company was joined by
Mentat, a young but very promising producer, who quickly figured out that these guys could be milked for some
money and offered his services in creating the project. After a while Mentat was noticed to have
one peculiarity: after three bottles of beer he would start drawing rather decent pictures. Spectre
decided not to let this go to waste and offered him a part in the project as an artist. And so
the work began to boil. This was the beginning of a new empire, the empire of Optical Brothers.
Well, now, after this short introduction to the OB line-up, you can look into the shameless eyes
of the people who did all the things they did ;).
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"You laugh in vain, but I am, so to speak, made in Malaisia. In the sultry summer of 1977, in the city of
Kuala Lumpur, my mum met a certain Japanese man... And in the spring of 1978 the globe
gained an inhabitant named Mentat. True, back then he had no idea of his great destiny:
to become one of the founders of OB", the culprit of this note once told us while drunk. But!..
From an early age Mentat was drawn to knowledge. At the age of four he learned to read in Intel4004
assembler and in Russian. Through comparative analysis Mentat realised that Russian was much harder,
and chose it... That is why you will never see any programs written by him,
nor cracks, nor FUCKs (scene disses, in machine code), nor salaries... His texts, on the other hand, are distinguished by, like, literacy, like, correctness
and, like, a richness of expressionings, which allowed Mentat to easily take Filosof's place at the head of Optical
Brothers right after the departure of the founding father.
Still, let us return to our hero's childhood. At the age of ten Mentat carried out a successful biological
experiment: he cloned himself! Twice!!! As proven by the photograph placed next
to this article. Why, you may ask, keep the successful outcome of human cloning a secret? Well,
Mentats are veeery lazy creatures, and they made one hundred percent use of their likeness. In particular, it was a great
help in finishing school and getting into three (!) institutes at once: radio engineering, medical and journalism. Fortunately,
owing to their laziness they never finished studying anywhere, so the population of the planet has been saved from a mad
gynaecologist, a Satanist journalist and a maniac radio-engineer-teacher. Unfortunately, they infiltrated
the OB group disguised as a self-taught designer. One, so to speak, for all of us...
So what does Mentat (three in one) actually do in the group? Well, firstly, he smokes, drinks and
leads girls astray, and comrade Spectre has taken up the latter quite seriously too. Secondly, every now and then he starts
doing something, chanting slogans, but more often than not it all ends with the slogans. Thirdly, he works nowhere
and has stopped paying the group members their salaries (or maybe he never paid them at all :) Fourthly... what's
fourthly?.. ah! yes! he plays Counter-Strike (team N.I.B., a.k.a. SwItch, a.k.a. ArsenaL), thanks to
which you can't even catch him at home.
Such a wicked person this Mentat is; we hope he will show up on our pages again with his
good news.
And so on, and off it went... Anyway, some day we will write about everyone.
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