The Clickomania decade

I’ve taken a look into the archive folder of my hard disk and found the very first version of Clickomania. And the file dates of those resources tell me: The tenth birthday of my game is ahead. I started at the end of December 1997 to program the game. I have been thinking how to celebrate this moment. For all intents and purposes, I wanted to do a new version. But alas, software development is terribly time-consuming, and I already have numerous duties scheduled for the days ahead. The anniversary version will have to wait.

I don’t do a new version right now, but I do something else. Because, after ten years, it occurred to me that this is finally the moment to reveal the last and biggest secret about Clickomania. It’s shameful, but after a decade, the time is ripe for a confession of the extent of that one I am about to give.

Clicking and undressing

Let me start that way: I have been asked a lot of times where the inspiration, the game idea has come from.

I came across the game when I first surfed the web. I found some Java or JavaScript mini app. It looked pretty ugly, but nevertheless, it had its addicting effect on me. But it wasn’t the ugliness that made me write my own version. The Internet was a rather expensive thing back then. At my hometown, there was no local Internet provider, so I had to do long distance calls to dial in with CompuServe. The resulting phone bill obviously had an impressive impact on my pocket money.

That how the commencements are explained in the help file of Clickomania next Generation. The Clickomania confession is this: the mini app was called “Klick mich frei” and could be found on the homepage of a magazine called “Praline”. Which is, after all, a dingy magazine with cheap pictures of… well, women without clothes. And with “Klick mich frei” (“click me free”), you could strip women.

Too good to go to waste like that

Ladies and gentlemen, please recollect yourselves… And let me try to give back this posting the festive moment that it had at the start. By saying this: The game idea (thanks to Wikipedia, I know now that it is Kuniaki Moribe, who had the genius to invent this clever game) is too good to be used for a cheap stripping game.

So, it was my mission to give Moribe’s idea back its dignity, to haul out of the quagmire. And this worked quite well – about two million downloads from my homepage alone is the proof for that.