The early days 1992 - 1994

After doing more boring jobs (in stock market software & network solutions) Jean-Marie Cannie
and Frank Van Biesen (company founders) wanted to have some more fun.

The first thing they did was develop a Tetris game clone and offered it on floppy disks in the 'little ads' in Computer Magazine. Surprisingly, this caught on and people asked for more. JMC writes: "This was the time CD-ROM games like 'The 7th Sense' started to appear and we decided to do a CD-ROM and teamed with 'Private', one of the bigger players in the over-18 games market. We released a whole bunch of our CD ROMs including 'Private Prison' and 'Private Castle''.

Around the same time, IBM held a "Da Vinci" contest where 1st prizes included color laptops (which cost about $8000 back then). As Image-Line didn't have a lot of cash to spare we reworked an existing game , mailed it in and won 1st prize in the multimedia category. The most important part wasn't the win, but that we met a 19 year old developer called Didier Dambrin (nicknamed Gol).

Didier not only won 1st in the 'Game' category but the 'Grand prize' too, a trip to the US. We immediately saw his talent and somehow convinced him to come and work for us. Gol's first game for us was Private Investigator and it involved some gruesome game play, pretty mild by today's standards, that caused the rapper Ice-T to shout: "This game beats cocaine!"... after playing if for like half an hour on our booth on the adult show in Las Vegas.  

We decided to use Gol's talent for something better and asked him to develop a platform game called Eat This.

Sadly enough for us, this was the time that everyone went 3D and most of it went by unnoticed. You can still download

and check out the demo on our Eat This page. This platform game really shows of Gol's coding and visual skills

(remember this was made in 1998).

The rest of our developers continued on our other products like Fact2000 (invoicing software), E-OfficeDirect (a content-based web tool that was the precursor of EZGenerator). We even topped the Belgian game charts 4 years in a row with the CD version of a popular Belgian TV show called Blokken (funnily enough, based on Tetris also).