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Tobias Richter

Star Trek on the Amiga, from public-domain disks to visual effects

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A German computer-science student who wrote a two-disk public-domain Star Trek game that seemed to be on every Amiga, and filled British PD catalogues with his ray-traced and animated starships under the Agatron name. He drew the graphics for Oil Imperium, made the intro for Team17's Alien Breed and later ran The Light Works, a computer-graphics and visual-effects company in Cologne.

In April 1990 the German magazine Amiga Joker introduced its readers to “Trekking Tobi”. He was Tobias Richter, a 22-year-old computer-science student from Darmstadt, and his two-disk Star Trek game was, the magazine said, the brightest star in the public-domain games sky. He had been a Star Trek fan for about ten years and had owned an Amiga for about three. Anyone could have a copy for 13 marks by post. In Britain the game and his animations of the starship Enterprise went round the public-domain libraries, the mail-order businesses that copied free software onto disks for the price of the disk, and the libraries’ adverts sold his work by name.

Fast facts

  • Based: Darmstadt in 1990; Cologne by the mid-1990s.
  • Known for: the public-domain Star Trek game (finished around the end of 1989); the Agatron disks of animations and ray-traced pictures.
  • Commercial work on the Amiga: all the graphics for Oil Imperium (1989); graphics for its follow-up Transatlantic; the intro to Team17’s Alien Breed (1991); animations for the German satirical puppet show Hurra Deutschland.
  • Tools named in the press: Videoscape 3D, the German ray tracer Reflections, Maxon’s Cinema 4D.
  • Later: The Light Works CD-ROM collection of his 3D work (1995); The Light Works, his computer-graphics company in Cologne.

Trekking Tobi’s Star Trek

Richter told Amiga Joker that he had first tried to write the game on an Apple, which “went pretty badly wrong”, and then in BASIC on the Amiga, where animation was hard to come by and 512K of memory was too little to compile the program. After buying more memory he started again, and he had finished it about four months before the interview. The player commands the Enterprise, at first carrying objects from planet to planet or to a space station, then intercepting rebel ships and fighting Klingons and Romulans. He wanted the player to have a great deal of freedom and the game to be as true to life as he could make it: the speeds obeyed the laws of physics, so that travelling at warp 1 took about 1,700 times as long as at warp 12. He had planned landings on planets, but stopped when the program grew too big.

British magazines rated it highly. Raze wrote in November 1990 that “the best Star Trek game of all must undoubtedly be Tobias Richter’s two disk Star Trek extravaganza”. Libraries advertised “Tobias Richter’s Star Trek (2)” in Amiga Format through 1991. Retro Gamer looked back in 2012: the game was “less Kirk and more Chekov”, but there was “something quite addictive about looking out of that view screen and clicking around the Enterprise’s controls”, and “it seemed like practically everyone with an Amiga had this disk at some point”.

Agatron and the PD libraries

The game was only part of his output. Richter edited a public-domain series of his own, “AGAtron”, made up mainly of computer animations. In 1989 the Wakefield library 17 Bit Software put “a special compilation of Star Trek Animations for ALL Amiga machines, animations by Tobias Richter” into its Amiga Computing pack. Amiga Format’s PD column explained in March 1990 that “the Agatron collection is put together by Tobias Richter of West Germany” and promised Star Trek fans “beautiful detailed shots of the Enterprise”. The One picked out “a bunch of wicked Videoscape animations from the prolific Tobias Richter, with subjects including Star Trek, Star Trek and sometimes Star Trek”, and in May 1990 a new Star Trek demo made with “an unreleased ray-tracing program called Reflections”. Amiga Format, explaining 3D software to its readers in 1991, used “Tobias Richter’s famous Star Trek demos” as the example of the modern science-fiction work programs like Videoscape were suited to.

The libraries’ catalogue lines show how well known he was. In 1991 Amiga Format‘s advertisers sold “Agatron 8: Fab Tobias Richter pics!”, “Agatron 6: Stunning ray traced slides!”, “Tobias Richter slideshow” and “AG.03 Star Trek (Agatron)… Tobias Richter”. In lists made up mostly of disk numbers and titles, his was one of the few artists’ names.

Commercial games

Richter told Amiga Joker that his two most important jobs so far were the computer animations for Hurra Deutschland, a satirical puppet show on German television, “and of course all the graphics for Oil Imperium”, the oil-business strategy game published by reLINE in 1989. When Amiga Joker previewed its follow-up, Transatlantic, a game about running a shipping line, it noted that the graphics were again by Richter, “only this time all the pictures are animated”.

He was also close to the British demo scene that became Team17. When Amiga Format announced in March 1991 that “some of the best demo writers in Europe have teamed-up to form a brand new software house: Team 17”, it named Richter alongside Rico Holmes among the people around 17 Bit. Team17’s Alien Breed opened that autumn with an introduction by him. The One called it “short but superb (as you’d expect from legendary demo programmer Tobias Richter)”, and ACE praised the whole presentation “from the Tobias Richter intro to the fast full-screen scrolling”.

Cologne and The Light Works

By the mid-1990s Richter was in Cologne and was a fixture of German Amiga software stands. At a German Amiga show reported early in 1994 he was on the stand of IFD, the publisher of the ray tracer Reflections, a program Amazing Computing expected to be “familiar to anyone who is aware of the work of Tobias Richter”. At the Computer ’95 show in November 1995 CU Amiga found “the famous Amiga animator, Tobias Richter” drawing large crowds at Maxon’s stand by showing what could be done with Cinema 4D. “You may not recognise this man, but you know his work,” Amiga Format told its readers in 1996.

His models and scenes were collected on a CD-ROM, The Light Works, published in Germany by Schatztruhe of Essen and sold in Britain by Almathera in 1995, with objects for Cinema 4D, Reflections and Imagine. Amiga Computing found its best models and scenes were Richter’s, by “a man who’s made quite a name for himself in the world of computer animation”, and Amiga Report’s reviewer described him as “famous for his Star Trek renders and his highly playable Shareware Star Trek game”. In 1999 Amiga Format’s gallery editor could still compare a reader’s picture with “Tobias Richter’s later work on the Amiga”.

The Light Works became the name of his computer-graphics company in Cologne, which offers visual effects, animation and visualisation. He has kept making starships. In 2011 the Star Trek novelist David Mack described a starbase fly-by by Richter of The Light Works, which he noted did the effects for the fan-produced series Star Trek: Phase II, and in 2024 a fan project recreating scenes from Space: 1999 credited “Visual Effects Supervisor Tobias Richter at The Light Works in Cologne, Germany” with its Eagle and Hawk spacecraft.

Sources

  • Amiga Joker (Germany), April 1990, p. 33: interview with Tobias Richter, “Trekking Tobi” (his age and studies, the Star Trek game and how he wrote it, warp speeds, Hurra Deutschland, Oil Imperium, the AGAtron series, 13 DM from Darmstadt). October 1990, p. 8: Transatlantic preview (graphics by Tobias Richter, all animated).
  • Amiga Action issue 1, October 1989, and CU Amiga, October 1989: Oil Imperium from reLINE.
  • Amiga Computing issues 15 and 16, 1989: 17 Bit Software advertisements for the Amiga Computing pack (disk 423, Star Trek animations by Tobias Richter).
  • Amiga Format issue 8, March 1990, p. 93: PD column on the Agatron collection.
  • The One issue 17, February 1990, p. 88 (Videoscape animations), and issue 20, May 1990, p. 92 (the Star Trek demo and Reflections).
  • Raze issue 1, November 1990, p. 82: “the best Star Trek game of all”.
  • Amiga Format issue 18, January 1991; issue 20, March 1991, pp. 25 and 41 (“Tobias Richter’s famous Star Trek demos”; the Team 17 announcement); issues 25 and 26, August and September 1991: public-domain library advertisements.
  • The One issue 37, October 1991, p. 74, and ACE issue 50, November 1991, p. 81: Alien Breed reviews and Richter’s intro.
  • Amazing Computing vol. 9 no. 2, February 1994, p. 55: IFD’s stand and Reflections. Vol. 11 no. 1, January 1996, p. 3: advertisement for The Light Works (“Tobias Richter from Cologne Germany”).
  • CU Amiga, January 1996, p. 20: Computer ’95 report, Richter at the Maxon stand with Cinema 4D.
  • Amiga Format issue 77, November 1995, pp. 20 and 79: advertisements for Light Works by Tobias Richter. Issue 90, November 1996, p. 20: “this is Tobias Richter”. Issue 126, August 1999, p. 78: The Gallery.
  • Amiga Computing issue 87, June 1995, p. 36: review of The Light Works (Almathera).
  • Jason Compton, review of The Light Works, Amiga Report Magazine issue 3.08 (web, secondary): Schatztruhe, Essen, 79 DM; contents and formats. https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/amigareport/www.amigareport.com/ar308/review7.html
  • Retro Gamer issue 106, September 2012, p. 62: “Star Trek: The Game, 1989, Tobias Richter”.
  • The Light Works, company website and imprint (web): Tobias Richter, Cologne; visual effects, animation and visualisation. https://www.thelightworks.com/
  • David Mack, blog post, 27 May 2011 (web, secondary): Richter’s starbase fly-by; The Light Works and Star Trek: Phase II. https://davidmack.pro/blog/tag/lightworks
  • “Reimagining Classic ‘Space: 1999’ Scenes with Visual Effects”, futuredude.com, 22 April 2024 (web, secondary). https://futuredude.com/?p=1437

See also

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