So, skimming through one of the Facebook pages that I follow I discovered a post about a German studio called Motelsoft. They had been active for thirty years, from 1985 until 2016 (or so) and supposedly released about 100 games in that time. Throughout this whole time it was mainly two guys. As far as I can tell they never released a single title that achieved international success but apparently they did occasionally get serious positive coverage in the German press in the 90s and even early 2000s.

Their oldest games seem like pretty typical stuff for that time, then they made tons of your typical shovel ware like sports, poker and puzzle games etc.. But interestingly they also made some games that seemed pretty professional and ambitious for their time. They made some RPGs / adventure games like a dungeon crawler series titled Darkside of the Sun and lots of other stuff that, at first glance looks like later Might & Magic games or Myst. Later on they also made some blends of RPG and shooter like Ocean City.

Amazingly these guys never seemed to really evolve, even their last games still stuck with this ugly early CGI style which was captured in this video of theirs (I have no idea what the purpose of this video is) and their final game from 2016 still looks like an early 2000's freeware title with an amazingly ugly UI.

I'm honestly not sure if these guys are brilliant dadaist artists or just really bad at what they've bee doing all their lives. Some of their stuff is so beautifully absurd that I'm pretty sure that it was intentional but in case of other stuff I'm not so sure. Some games were apparently released as freeware all along while others apparently had commercial releases at least in Germany.

Anyway, so some guy fascinated by their legacy acquired all their stuff and is maintaining their website now. You can actually download almost all of their games there. I'm afraid all of them are in German but they may still be worth a look.

I figured some GOGers may be interested in this stuff.

Huh, seems interesting! Would have never known this exists if you had not posted this! Ocean city looks pretty cool, I'll definetly try it out! Plus I have a friend that is fluent in German, so I can get them to help me translate! :D

Hello,

This is indeed something. Never heard of them and never heard of their games. Well, I did in a certain way considering their names are absolutely generic.

I have one "Darkstone" in my GoG wishlist that came out in 1999 made by Delphine Software while Motelsoft released a "Darkstone" in 1998.

It's not unusual to find weird PC games alongside international release on shelves in Germany though. But after skimming through the list on the website I'm fairly certain I never came across any.

I'd be interested in an history of the company as I do wonder how you can begin with text adventure, only to end up doing cheap erotic games.

Sadly, my german won't be good enough to investigate. Hope someone can provide more information in the future.

interesting, i like their artstyle, its kinda freaky moebius. dont know about their games but i like their philosophy

That video was like watching something by David Lynch

Wow, so cool. Thanks for the heads-up.

In Germany everybody knows Motelsoft! No seriously, I never heard of them.

This is interesting, I never heard of Motelsoft before. Thanks for sharing.

Gonna try Magic Empire, it sounds great :D

You gave me a heart attack for a second, lol.

I used to live in Germany and also regularly read local magazines like PC Joker and Gamestar. I think I'm pretty well-informed as far as German video games, at least from the 90s and early 2000s, go and remember all sorts of obscure shit that never found any recognition overseas. Yet I had never heard of either one of their games, nor has anyone I've asked.