Mercenary IV: Behind the scenes



You already suspected it and I'm confirming it: Mercenary IV is nothing but an April fool's joke, thought by me and suggested to the editors of Zzap! who accepted the suggestion. Do you want to know more about its creation?
Mercenary 4?

The title screen has been ripped from Mercenary 3:
No, Mercenary 3!

and the logo was modified (taking the first I on the left and shearing it first of 45° on the left, then of 45° on the right to turn it into a V.
The new Novagen logo really exists: there's a genetic engineering lab called Novagen with that very logo.

What do Midas e Damocles have in common?
Midas......or Damocles?
Their ground pictures have both been obtained from a Duke Nukem 3D level!
Never mind, the place is the same!
The same level for both!

Damocles? No, Hale-Bopp!

The comet Damocles is the comet Hale-Bopp that appeared in 1997.

Goodbye detail!

This is a real Mercenary - Escape from Targ picture, but it comes from the Amiga version; it has been modified with the GUI from the PC version of Damocles.

And what about the other pictures, for examples these ones?

For these and other ones I can only thank Mo Warden who kindly released PC Damocles pictures and Simon Guyart who uploaded them on his site.

Hey! Simon Guyart doesn't have this picture!

He doesn't have it because I made it! I grabbed Triton's texture (which is present in Simon Guyart's site), I converted it into a HAM picture and I warped it with Deluxe Paint 4.
How has the sound been obtained?
The Mercenary's voice is my own voice. The control tower is the Amiga's voice you can hear using the program Say.
The sound of the spaceship taking off is actualy the noise of an F22 taking off as you can hear it in the game F22 Raptor.

Is the plot original?
The plot has been inspired by Zecharia Sitchin's book: The Twelfth Planet.

This esplains why Mercenary 4 is subtitled The Eleventh Planet and why the plot is like that. Read that book and you'll find the planet Marduk, the Nephilim and other things!
The emission of radio signals by the pyramids is a quotation from Arthur C. Clarke: in 2001: A space odyssey the black monolith on the Moon (another "alien monument") does exactly that!