The Oath was produced in only three month. It was done, because Attic wanted to do a shooter. Sascha Jungnickel was doing his Abitur back then and neglected his education a bit while doing the graphics (it nevertheless got quite well ;).

The programmr, Jonathan Small, and Sascha never met personally until the last level, short before the release. Jonathan was working in the UK and Sascha in Freiburg.

The cooperation was managed by Guido Henkel back then.

Some of the grahics and leveldesign (blockgraphics in editor) were done by Sascha on his Amiga 2000 while beeing on vacation at the sea, and he had quite a lot fun.

Sascha is quite unhappy with the collision, he made it a few pixels to large - that may be one reason why The Oath is so hard ;)

Sadly The Oath was never a big success - although it got good reviews. It just was a bad time for shoot `em ups and, more important, Psygnosis, who wanted to publish it outside of germany, had financial problems and so never sold it.


01.11.2004: Just got a mail of Jonathan Small:
Hi,

I just saw The Oath Shrine. Thats great! I'm Jonathan Small, the programmer on the title.

Glad to see it hasn't completely disappeared it obscurity, and somepeople actually liked it :)

I now run Small Rockets + we have a couple of shooters Star Monkey and Ultra Assault. They weren't written by me, but I can vouch for them being good shooters.

All the best, and long live the shooter!

Jonathan