Western Shooting is a shooting game designed for a specific cabinet and running on a custom board developped and published by Art & Magic (our team), manufactured by Themes (Deltatec) and distributed by Gauselmann Group in Germany.

How it all started

Work for hire

Stone Ball and Cheese Chase were behind us, and we moved yet to another quick development. Spellsinger was dead (see the Spellsinger story here). We were hitting a new low and it was a work-for-hire order from our distributor the Gauselmann Group, a shooting game for one of their custom cabinets.

This time we had only 3 month to complete the entire game. Although the design was pretty simple, the programmers had to comply with the hardware specification of the cabinet's gun in order to drive the game.

On the art department side, we decided to create 4 levels. Iwan Scheer did some animations. Thierry Faymonville made two levels (Bar and Bank) and drew the ending picture, Michael Defroyennes made another level (Saloon) and the leatherboard and I did the Village entrance level and the intro screen.

Beginning of the end

The last projects had been selling less and less and the hardware had not been updated for what looked like ages to us.

We knew we would soon hit a wall if nothing was done to brighten up the future of the company. There was this European project to co-develop some real time 3d technology, but it was drowning, head and shoulder below thick layers of opaque bureaucracy. Nothing concrete was on the horizon.

This is the time we decided to leave Art & Magic and create Appeal. Yves Grolet moved first with Philippe Zondack, another programmer to do some research on voxel technology. Yann Robert and I quickly followed, then Infogrames came into the loop and decided to finance our next project and company.

The rest of the Art & Magic team who had stayed worked yet on another game for the Gauselmann Group, a gambling game this time. This was just too much for them too, and most finally joined us at Appeal when their 3D tennis game (Magic Tennis) finally got canned by lack of proper 3D hardware.

After that, Art & Magic never made another video game. It stayed in limbo for years and was finally liquidated by the Deltatec team during summer 2008.

Game images gallery

I unfortunately have only very few images left from this game as it is almost impossible to find it anywhere and all the source files have been lost.

Credits

Programming: Yves Grolet, Yann Robert, Philippe Zondack

Art: Franck Sauer, Michael Defroyennes, Thierry Faymonville, Iwan Scheer

Marketing and quality control: Christian Dutillieux

Sounds: Franck Sauer

Hardware design: Deltatec

How to play the game today

This is an extremely rare board/cabinet. So far I have not been able to find any site mentioning they have one. The game is listed at several places as a very rare item. There is no emulation that I know of.