These last few weeks we have been immersed in the physical production of Operation Alexandra. Finally, this weekend we have managed to finalise the preparations and we have the first batch of shipments ready. It has not been an easy task, and here we share with you the succession of favourable and adverse circumstances we have faced during this endeavour. Here we go!
A deluxe physical edition
Getting into a physical production is always a new challenge for us, and in this case it has been no less so… No matter how many productions you’ve done before, there are always special circumstances that make the adventure of self-production a unique experience. And of course, on this occasion, it was no less.
In the production of Operation Alexandra we were very clear about 2 requirements:
- To develop a high quality product, which meets the highest expectations of collectors.
- The selling price should be as low as possible, so that everyone who wants it will not be left without it.
You don’t have to be very clever to see that these two requirements are at opposite ends of the spectrum… Yes, that’s how weird we are! But it was clear to us that we were going to fight for this right from the start.
We start our engines
With this concept in mind we got down to work. The physical production consists of a shipping box, product packaging, instruction manual, cassette, and, as icing on the cake, a CD with the soundtrack of the video game with a lot of extras. Each of these elements requires a separate production and purchase, so everything has to be coordinated to assemble the final product. And of course, to tackle each production, you have to prepare the material (artwork and music) and pay first…
An important decision we made at the beginning was to bear the total investment ourselves. We decided not to organise a pre-order, but to make a financial contribution between all of us in the hope that, once all the units had been sold, we would recoup the investment. At the time of writing this article we have not reached this milestone, but we have faith that, although it will take some time, we will achieve it.
There are some suppliers that we were very clear about, such as the packaging or the instruction manual, but others we were not so sure about, such as the production of cassettes or CDs. We were not fully satisfied with the cassette suppliers we had used in the past and this was our first production of an audio CD, so we had to search, research, ask for quotes and evaluate different suppliers. In the case of the CDs, it was straightforward, just as we had hoped. In the case of the cassettes, it was complicated, as we also expected…
The company we chose for the production of the cassettes was very friendly and professional, even offering us a couple of free tests so that we could evaluate the final result using several different settings in the recording of the information. One test was fair and the other was poor. But that experience made us think that we had the key to make the final duplication a success and there was no more time for testing.
Sale begins
By the time we gave the go-ahead for the production of cassettes and CDs, we already had everything else in place: packaging box, packaging and instruction manual. With the suppliers’ estimation of when we would receive the order of cassettes and CDs, we started everything related to the sale of the videogame: website in our shop and social media campaign (mainly twitter). On 30 November we launched the campaign and set the shipping date for 12 December, a week after the estimated date of receipt of the material, in order to have some “leeway”.
It is important to bear in mind that embarking on the sale of a physical production involves getting the word out. It is necessary to publicise the product, inform followers and reach a potentially interested public. We have invested a considerable amount of time and effort to publicise this initiative, developing a “guerrilla” campaign on social networks. We feel very fortunate for the response from the public in general, and from our followers in particular, sending us countless expressions of affection with very positive comments and helping us to spread the message with retweets. Our sincere thanks to all of you who have given us a hand in these endeavours!
Houston, we have a problem
Well, the CDs arrive. All is well. The cassettes are delayed a bit, and on the 10th they fall into our hands. All wrong… Most of the cassettes have problems loading on a CPC 464…
What has happened? Have we failed in our analysis of the duplication tests? Is the test CPC working properly? Is it the azimuth? Is the cassette not of the expected quality? Has a one-eyed man looked at us? God!!!! After the first tests we can see that the quality of the tapes is excellent, a great relief, but our problem persists. One thing is clear, we have to record the tapes ourselves. We use the letter G in our agenda to contact Jaime González Serrano (@johnnyfarragut), who directs us to Javier Peña (a.k.a Utopian: @jf_pena) and Luis García (a.k.a Benway: @BenwayRW), who kindly lend us the professional duplicator of their team, Retroworks. We are very grateful for the detail ^_^ Hooray! We managed to avoid the pitfall!!!…. Not really.
The professional duplicator duplicates perfectly, but we realise that the cassette loader has a 2000 baud turbo part that systematically causes copies to fail at random points. At this point we reach ground zero of the problem: we should not use a turbo loader in a mass duplication. Well, that’s OK, we redo the loader and so on… Well, no. The footage of the tape is very tight and if we lower the speed of the turbo part, it doesn’t fit everything in the cassette… We have to find another solution.
And it is precisely during the search for a technique that allows us to lower Kb. and thus pass the turbo load to normal load, when we focus our attention on some emails sent by BlackHole just a few days ago. Attention… It turns out that our friend BlackHole is an expert in tape loaders and compressors. Days ago, with our announcement about the physical release of Operation Alexandra, BlackHole decided to test the game and was puzzled about the tape load times. He delved into the issue and developed a reverse-engineered method that reworks the entire tape loading and compression system of the game. Thanks to this compression system, he managed to considerably lighten the tape loader, as well as reducing the decompression times to hundredths of a second. A technical work that left us all amazed and astonished in equal parts. Absolutely providential the work of BlackHole! We would like to express our deep gratitude for his great selfless work, and emphasize that his talent in the compression of the game is within the reach of very few people. Thank you very much BlackHole!
Happy ending!
With a master without turbo loading problems, and thanks to Retroworks‘ professional duplicator, in just under 3 hours we had all the tapes perfectly recorded and ready to be packaged. At this moment the first 50 packages are ready to be shipped.
With this story we just want to show some of the ins and outs of what the adventure of making a physical production entails. You have to make a previous investment, you have to spend many hours gathering budgets and choosing suppliers, you have to work to develop all kinds of material such as graphic arts or musical compositions, you have to set up a publicity campaign to publicise the launch… And yes, there are also problems and unforeseen circumstances to deal with. It’s true, it’s a lot of work, but you should know that the pleasure of holding this physical production in your hands is also very great, and every time we see on social networks how you proudly show off photographs of your new videogame, we feel a tremendous satisfaction that more than compensates for all this great production work.
