Manfred Trenz came into games as an artist. He had trained as a structural draughtsman, and in the mid-1980s he entered a graphics competition in the German Commodore magazine 64’er. Rainbow Arts saw his work and hired him to draw. “Then I started doing some coding,” he told ZZAP! in 1991: “this was quite a surprise to them because they didn’t know I could do this!” His first game, Katakis, was so close to Irem’s R-Type that Activision, which held the licence, had it pulled from British shops. His third, Turrican, won a ZZAP! Gold Medal at 97%. He designed it, drew it and programmed it himself; only the music was by someone else.
Fast facts
- Born: 1965, in Saarbrücken.
- Rainbow Arts: graphic artist from 1987, then programmer.
- Commodore 64 games: The Great Giana Sisters (graphics, 1987), Katakis (1988, reissued as Denaris), the C64 R-Type (with others), Turrican (1990), Turrican II (1991), Enforcer (1992).
- Later: Super Turrican for the NES, Rendering Ranger for the Super Famicom (Japan only, 1995), and the cancelled Turrican 3D.
- Partner: the graphic artist and designer Andreas Escher worked with him on most of these games.
From the competition to Rainbow Arts
Trenz first used a Commodore VIC-20 in 1984, bought a Commodore 64, taught himself BASIC and then assembly language when BASIC proved too slow. He told Retro Gamer in 2005 that he came third in 64’er’s graphics competition in 1986; ZZAP! had reported in 1991 that he won it. Either way, Rainbow Arts wrote asking to see more, and took him on. “At first I did animation graphics, title screens and so on.”
His first credit was the graphics for the C64 version of The Great Giana Sisters (1987), programmed by Armin Gessert with music by Chris Hülsbeck. It was withdrawn in 1988 after Nintendo objected to its likeness to Super Mario Bros.
Katakis
Trenz asked Rainbow Arts’ boss, Marc Ullrich, whether he could write a game, “and he said go ahead”. He started with the scrolling, “because this was the most important thing”, and then took it to Andreas Escher, who designed the game and drew half the graphics. Hülsbeck wrote the music. The programming took seven months, “then I had a vacation, four weeks at home with my parents, because if I spend too long on computers I go crazy!”
The result was Katakis, a horizontally scrolling shoot-’em-up with twelve levels. Escher said later that the pair had based it on their favourite arcade games, R-Type and Darius. ZZAP! gave it 93% in October 1988, called it “the closest you can get to R-Type on a humble 8-bit”, and summed it up as “at present, the best R-Type variant on the 64”.
That was the trouble. Activision held the home licence for Irem’s R-Type, and the same month CRASH reported that Katakis “will never see the light of day” because Activision thought it looked “a bit too much like R-Type”. ZZAP! had to replace a Katakis demo on its cover cassette. Rainbow Arts settled by doing Activision’s work: Trenz helped write the official C64 conversion of R-Type, which Escher said took only six weeks, and the programmers who became Factor 5 wrote the Amiga one. In Julian Eggebrecht’s account to Edge, Activision had been impressed enough by the Amiga Katakis to let Rainbow Arts keep selling the game if they coded an Amiga R-Type for it within three months. Katakis came back in 1989 as Denaris, with a new second level, and ZZAP! ruled that it still deserved its original marks.
Turrican
Trenz had enjoyed Thalamus’s Armalyte for a few days, he told ZZAP!, then got bored: “same style, same attack waves all the way through.” For his next game he wanted “another action game but away from spaceships”. He started on the ideas for what became Turrican in January 1989 and, once more, wrote the scrolling first. It was the hardest part, “because it was eight-way and very fast”. The first two versions did not work once sprites were added; the third did. The One asked where the name came from. “Oh, just picked it from the telephone book,” Trenz said. “There are loads of good material out there, you don’t have to bother making it up.”
He drew the levels on paper first and built them with his own level and object editors. The bosses were the hard part, he told Retro Gamer: built from many multiplexed sprites, they were difficult to show without flicker. The giant metal fist came from the Beatles film Yellow Submarine, where the Blue Meanies attack Pepperland with a huge blue fist. For monsters he drew on “strange books”, H. R. Giger’s Necronomicon among them, along with Japanese games magazines and books about plants and animals.
ZZAP! gave the C64 Turrican 97% and a Gold Medal in May 1990. The Turrican entry tells the story of the game, its four-month Amiga rewrite by Factor 5 and its conversions. Trenz said he worked only on the C64, Amiga and NES versions; the Super Nintendo and Mega Drive games “had nothing to do with me”.
Turrican II (1991) went further. ZZAP! described its “huge superbaddies: several screens high, beautifully detailed, and yet moving around so smoothly”, and its readers voted Trenz the second-best programmer of 1991 while giving Turrican II three awards. At Rainbow Arts in Düsseldorf he was working “nine-to-nine” and reckoned “90% of the ideas are mine”.
The ninth sprite
The Commodore 64 can show eight hardware sprites on any one line, and every programmer knew it. In April 2000 the German magazine GO64! printed an April-fool interview in which Escher claimed Trenz had managed nine. When Trenz heard about the joke he got in touch to say it could be done:
All you need to do is reset the X position in a grid line with a grid line interrupt and with exact timing.
As the raster beam passes one sprite, the program moves that sprite further along the same line, so it is drawn twice. The trick “eats computing time like hell”, Trenz admitted.
After the Commodore
Trenz wrote Super Turrican for the NES (1992) on his own, the German magazine Video Games reported. He told Retro Gamer he was “far from satisfied” with it, because a short schedule had cost it much of the earlier games’ gameplay and difficulty. His last C64 game was Enforcer (1992), a shoot-’em-up in the style of Katakis published by the German CP Verlag, which GO64! called “another action game classic”.
On the Super Famicom he made Rendering Ranger: R2, released in 1995 only in Japan, which Retro Gamer credited to him as sole creator. It began as Targa with hand-drawn sprites; after Donkey Kong Country there was, Retro Gamer said, “a perceived demand for CG sprites”, and the originals were scrapped. A Turrican 3D for the PC, announced under the Rainbow Arts name for 1999, was stopped by THQ and never released. Trenz said in 2005 that the Turrican rights were “now in the wrong hands”.
Public reference works list his later games as handheld and console titles for other publishers, among them Micro Machines V3 for the Game Boy Color (2000), CT Special Forces for the PlayStation (2003) and several Nintendo DS games, and say he co-founded Denaris Entertainment Software in 2004 to work on a Katakis 2 that has not been released.
Sources
- Stuart Wynne, interview with Manfred Trenz, ZZAP! issue 69, January 1991: his age, the competition, joining Rainbow Arts, Katakis/Denaris and Activision, Armalyte, the making of Turrican and Turrican II, his working hours, his books.
- ZZAP! issue 42, October 1988: Katakis review, 93%.
- CRASH issue 57, October 1988, news: Katakis stopped after Activision’s objection.
- Commodore Computing International vol. 7 no. 2, October 1988: Katakis by Manfred Trenz and Andreas Escher.
- The Games Machine issue 8, July 1988: Giana Sisters, C64 version by Armin Gessert, graphics by Manfred Trenz.
- ZZAP! issue 61, May 1990: Turrican, Gold Medal, 97%. Issue 79, December 1991: Turrican II in a review of a compilation. Issue 85, June 1992: readers’ awards for 1991.
- The One issue 28, January 1991: Turrican II development team and the name.
- Edge issue 122, April 2003, “The making of… Turrican”: Trenz as a trained structural draughtsman; Julian Eggebrecht on Katakis and the Amiga R-Type.
- GO64! April 2000: Andreas Escher interview (Katakis, R-Type in six weeks). May 2000: “Master of the Ninth Sprite?” and “Nostalgia: Portrait of Rainbow Arts”, part two (Hurrican renamed, Enforcer). August 1999: Enforcer published by CP.
- Video Games (Germany), January 1993: NES Super Turrican by Trenz alone.
- Retro Gamer issue 21, 2005: “The making of Turrican” (VIC-20, the 64’er competition, level design, the bosses and the fist, the conversions, the NES game, the rights) and “Global Gaming: Germany” (Rendering Ranger).
- PC Player, June 1999: Turrican 3D announced.
- Wikipedia, “Turrican” (web, secondary): Turrican 3D halted by THQ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turrican
- Wikipedia, “Manfred Trenz”, and Wikipedia (German), “Manfred Trenz” (web, secondary): date and place of birth, later games, Denaris Entertainment Software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_Trenz and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_Trenz