Platypus is a fast, frantic and fun arcade-style shoot-em-up!!

The vast continent-spanning city of Collosatropolis has finally reached the limits of its expansion. Tall buildings cover every available space. The air is thick with smoke and poisonous chemicals. Parking is a nightmare.

The Collosotropolan leaders have decided the simplest solution is to invade the neighbouring country of Mungola. They don't anticipate much of a struggle - Mungolans are simple, earthy types without much love for industry. In fact, Mungola's entire defence force consists of a single squadron of fighter planes - the venerable F-27 "Platypus".

What possible threat could a few antique aircraft be to the mighty Collosotropolan Battle Fleet...?

To the Mungolan people the venerable F-27 "Platypus" is their last best hope for freedom!

It started as all games do, with an idea.
According to his own words, during the time of its inception, Anthony was struggling to find work as an animator. In an act of careful planning (or desperate measure), he decided to create a game that would hopefully help him reach more economic stability and showcase his talents. Because he had the necessary clay animating equipment in his home office, he envisioned a game that combined his love of animation with a shooter video game.

After a few screenshots of his work began to surface, he was contacted by Idigicon with a publishing contract that would see Anthony net USD $2000.00. Not a large sum of money for the ridiculous amount of work it takes for game creation (especially using clay models), but at the time he was definitely “in need”. He signed the contract which would commit him to 18 months of grueling work to finish the game, that Idigicon would then put in boxes in stores.

Roughly at the midpoint of this 18 month grind, the Squashy Software’s office was destroyed in a fire that saw the entire apartment building complex in which it was situated, burn to the ground. Luckily nobody was hurt, but Anthony and the rest of the residents lost everything. At the time there was no such thing as a “cloud backup”. Anthony would have lost everything from the Platypus project if it weren’t for the mere chance that a few days prior he had brought a CD containing things over to a friend’s house. Since he didn’t seem to have adequate insurance, Anthony not only had to rebuild a home, but an office and equipment to finish the game. What started as a dream for making a bit of money to help out in a slow time, quickly turned into a desperate bid for survival. Making it through the last Idigicon checkpoint, Anthony provided the final game after an 18 month marathon. One can only imagine his disappointment when the game was finally released, only to see it quickly disappear off the sales charts and into the discount bin. Being forced to label this period of life as a “learning experience”, he picked himself up and moved on to his next project as he foresaw the demise of Platypus.

But he would find out that it was not The End; only The Beginning.

While knowing about the development history of Platypus, it wasn’t until a few years later that Mike Boeh of Retro64 wanted to build his online games business by releasing an online version of Platypus on his portal. After contacting Idigicon to acquire the rights, Mike set to work to make some improvements to the game to hopefully increase its attractiveness with players. The gambit worked, and upon its release Platypus rocketed to the top of the portal’s sales charts dominating them for a relatively long period of time. With this newfound success, Anthony contacted Idigicon to make some inquiries about royalty revenue. He was shocked to discover that there wouldn’t be any coming his way;this publishing deal was between Idigicon and Retro64. Anthony was further crushed to find out that in his original agreement with Idigicon, he inadvertently lost the rights to his own work. I’ll rephrase it, because it’s extremely important. In order to publish the game, Anthony had given up his intellectual property of Platypus.

In the world of business, some of the more reprehensible acts have always been justified by the identification of line items and/or terms in a contract. While the spirit of a contract is to protect the signers, all too often the case it often is used as a sword by one side or a shield by the other.

In this story, there are no real “good” or “bad” characters. Anthony was responsible for signing away his own intellectual property that he had in Platypus, as he probably made some assumptions combined with under-estimating its importance. All Idigicon can be “at fault” for in this case is effectively managing this acquired I.P. On paper, it is the sole owner of Platypus, having already paid Anthony what was agreed upon in the original contact: USD $2,000.00.

Platypus still lives on today, being recently released for the mobile phone market (IOS only) and Playstation Portable enjoying probably 6 figure revenues; now nearly 8 years since its’ original release.

A link to know more about what Anthony Flack thinks about the port of Platypus for the Sony PlayStation Portable.
http://forums.indiegamer.com/threads/platypus-on-psp.9220/