Hi James,

I believe spoke to you on Saturday night, when you called me asking for information about the game. You have chosen not to repeat any of the details that I gave you, so as the original creator of Droplitz I feel that I should respond.

Droplitz started life as a personal project called Cascade, probably in 2003/04. I had previously worked on my own prototype in Torque 2D, but I wasn't much of a programmer at the time, so I employed the help of a friend of mine to create a more playable version where the logic actually worked.

I have spent some time since our conversation looking through my archives, and I've been able to find (on an old DVD backup) some of the original work that went into the game.

The prototype went through a couple of iterations, and ultimately resulted in the following prototype (which I used to pitch the game within Blitz's internal greenlight program), and you'll see from the timestamps of the files, it was created in 2005, some time before you started on Trax:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/lhbmfn63b0ltznw/cascadeBlitz.rar?dl=0

As a game idea, it already owes a lot to what came before it - games like Pipemania/Pipedream and its many clones and the boardgame Downfall have clear influences on the game. Like any game idea, the value was in the execution, the team at Blitz did an incredible job turning a raw idea into a something that looked, felt, and sounded great.

It is unsurprising that someone would come up with a similar focus for a game, but it's neither fair nor true to say that I or Blitz stole your idea, to categorise it as a vast conspiracy does a disservice to the people who worked hard on creating the game.

I'm sorry that you've carried these negative experiences with you for so long, but unfortunately you are completely mistaken in this matter.

I am glad you are still generating game ideas, and developing your own games, and I hope that this exchange offers you the chance to move forward in the future.