The Invasion: Trivia! Story

Way back in 2003, myself and a friend of mine named Anthony Volpe were toying with ideas for games we wanted to make. This would be our first endeavor together, so we were looking anywhere for inspiration.

Microsoft's PocketPC platform was all the rage at that point. Well, okay, fine, "all the rage" is doing some heavy lifting there! But aside from Palm, there really wasn't too much else in town, so we thought it might make an interesting target. I knew I would wind up doing most, if not all, of the coding, and at that point that I didn't want to do TOO complex a project since I was really just getting started on PocketPC development.

So, I proposed the idea of a trivia game, since I knew that wouldn't be too tough to pull off. Anthony was cool with that idea. Okay, so, we had the idea (not an original one, of course, but that wasn't a requirement), but we didn't have a different take on it.

But we both have an... ahem... interesting... sense of humor to this day. And we knew we wanted to bring that into the mix (and this was many years before the Jackbox series, so it was, somewhat, unique back then!).

Then, while talking one day, we started messing around a bit with wacky voices, 'cause we're the kind of dudes who would just randomly do that sometimes! We always mixed things up a bit... a little Beavis and Butt-Head here, a little Kang and Kodos from The Simpsons there, and all of a sudden we were making up Krelmac and Gentoo dialog on the spot. We realized immediately that was the hook we needed!

So, a few months later, we had Invasion: Trivia! up and running on my Casio E-125, the same device you see above! We then recorded all the dialog, wrote an engine to play "cinematic cut scenes", such as they were, and the game you can play above was born.

Now, for all the talk of a hook, the game sold pretty terribly. I think we sold a few hundred copies, and before too long we sold exclusive distribution rights to a PocketPC magazine company, and not long after that, we just released it for free.

One interesting note is that Krelmac and Gentoo made an appearance in the follow-up game K&G Arcade, which you can actually grab the Windows port from my personal site for free. It is, I think, a much better game overall, there's certainly a lot more to it!

So, was I:T a success? Obviously not! It was a flat-out failure in terms of making us rich and famous anyway. But it was a learning experience, and a good time too (the recording sessions were a riot, as I recall). So, it's what you call a success by a different name, I suppose. Either way, it's a part of our shared history, and I'll always be proud of it.

Oh, and as you play it, remember that these questions are from the turn of the century, and some of them haven't aged well, and FOR SURE some of them are no longer accurate. I put zero effort into updating them as part of this port. In fact, porting this to Phaser was an exceedingly quick-and-dirty exercise... it works, but I'm not going to hold the code up as a prime example of much of anything. It is what it is, many of the same warts from the original have carried over, and that includes the question!

Okay, well, that's it, that's the story. Have fun if you dare! Krelmac and Gentoo out!