In June 90 there was a competition by the French magazine 'Generation 4' and one could win a Archimedes and a MutiSync Monitor. Some weeks later there was also a copy-party called 'Red Sector and Silents Summer Conference 1990'. So, Thomas Landspurg (Tom Soft) worked at this time on a demo with the name 'A Trip To Mars' and decided to finnish it at first for the Gen 4 competition. Well, what has happened? ...read the following text to get more information about Tom, he was interviewed by Chester of BRAINSTORM. 
 
³-Tell us about the whole story of your demo 'A trip to Mars'. (With all steps like Gen4 and Rsi/Tsl Party!) 
¹So, the whole story: (it's a little bit long!) 
First, this demo "A Trip to Mars" have been made for the French PaperMag Gen4. They made a demo-competition, and the first price was an Archimede 3000 with a multi-sync monitor! A great price, isn't it? In fact, there were two A3000 and monitor: one for the Atari-St competition, and one for the Amiga. 
So I've decided to make a demo for this, and I started to code this demo. I think it was a nice demo, based on the the subject of this competition, the 3615 Gen4, wich is like a public BBS (the minitel for the people who know it). So I've tried to find a story about this. 
The demo was in full plain 3d, including vectorballs, and more than one object a time. I think that there was no 3d-demo who do this at the moment. And I've put a first part, who look like more a normal demo. The end of this competition was the beginning of June. But I've also heard of the Rsi/Tsl party, and at the moment I already know that my demo won't win Gen4 competition, so I made a better version for this party, because there was some things that I wanted to add, and nobody saw this demo before this party. But I couldn't came to this party so I gave my disk to two guys: Stinger of Paradox and another one. 
So, I don't know exactly what happen at this party, but what I know is that everybody saw this demo, but Silent didn't wanted to make this demo participate: Why? This is a mistery (they talked of a game preview...). After that, there came the result of the Gen4 competition: the winner was a crew called Dragons. But the Dragons's demo was full of ripped graphics music and code, and all the effect were already seeing on the Amiga: vectorballs, parallax scroll, scrolls,... So, it was not bad, but it was quite normal. But my demo didn't win anything, and even get no pictures! So I asked why: They told me it doesn't look like a pirate's demo, but more like a game preview and so on! 
So I was very disapointed. It was the first time that I wanted to win something with one of my demos! 
 
³-What sort of magazine is Gen4? 
¹Gen4 (Generation 4) is a french papermag who talk about computer games on Amiga, St, Pc and Consoles. They have a lot of pictures, but they say a lot of bullshit, like: F-29 is the game of the year or they always said that 3d-simulations are really fast on the PC (faster than Amiga) but they test them on a 386-Pc with math processor and Vga+! 
 
³-How much time did you need to produce your demo. (In months) 
¹I think I spent more than 2 month for the whole demo (including the Rsi/Tsl version), but I've started before with my existing 3d routines! That's why I'm really disapointed with this demo. 
Perhaps this time seems to be enormous long for some of you, but: 
a. 3d is not very easy to manage, and the code is very long. 
b. I wanted to do something great. That's why I don't make a lot of demos. 
 
³-I heard that you were not at the Rsi-Tsl Party. 
¹Yes, that's true, I wasn't at this party because it was too far from Paris: 20 hours in train (and 20 hours to go back) and I had only a two days week-end (48 hours!), I wasn't on holidays. 
 
 (Find out why in next article..)
     (...continued.) 
 
I don't know if you have to be at the party to show your demos. I don't think so, but I'm not usuall with this, because it was the first time that I participate to a competition. 
 
³-So, you will stop producing demos? ¹Yes! Because I think I spent too much time doing demo. I think that instead of doing this last demo I could have made a "normal" game during this time, and earn a little bit of money! 
 
³-You are workig for UBI-Soft. Why? 
¹I've started to work for Ubi-Soft two years ago, for a conversion wich is not yet finished know (not my fault), and wich is really a shit. But we were (two years ago) in a very nice castle so it was fine. 
 
³-You have done the Intro for UNREAL, was this a hard job to do? 
¹Not really, because I had already the vectorballs routines. I've only improved them. You must know that this intro is in 6 bitplanes, with another sprite bitplane, and there is sometime 80 balls on the screen. And the first time that the programmers put the intro in the game, it worked! So, there were no problems! 
 
³-How much money did you get for the Intro? 
¹This point is not totally decided yet! 
 
³-Tell us more about creating parts for games. 
¹If you want to speak of the Unreal intro, it's not really a part of a game, because it's just the intro. But if the game is well made (just like Unreal) it's easy to include some other parts for a game. 
 
³-Are you able to convert the 'Trip to Mars'-demo to a game? 
¹I think yes, because I always try to code things to make them reusable. I don't make my code just for one demo. That's why converting this demo to a game won't be very difficult. 
 
³-Will you do it? 
¹If I do a 3d game, it will be better and faster than this demo. But this will takes me a lot of time. At the moment I make a little break with 3d and I try to code a little 2d-games, what is easiest! 
 
³-Did you contact Gen4 by mail or do you know any editors personally? 
¹I just send a letter to Gen4, and I don't know any of the editors. 
 
³Okay, we all in BRAINSTORM hope that you won't quite the scene, but if you do we wish you anyway good luck for your future... 
  ¹Chester/BRS and Thomas Landspurg