Unfortunately, the Captain Comic game was missing one essential ingredient: registration incentives. Although people played it faithfully, they rarely bothered to send money to the author. The sequel to Captain Comic, Captain Comic II: Fractured Reality did not do much better as a retail offering. The publisher, ComputerEasy did little to promote the game, and sales were mediocre.

Michael went on to write the popular Floor Plan home design software, which sold for several years. As far as I know, Michael no longer writes games.

The arch nemesis of Captain Comic (besides bad marketing) was the Skrejgib, spelled backwords as "big jerks", which no doubt Michael met a few of during his game programming career.

Exciting Update: In November, Michael Denio himself visited this site! He says he enjoyed seeing his story on the web, and thought it was mostly accurate, except he isn't sure he wrote the first PC side scroller (I think he wrote the first one that was any good -- I don't remember seeing any others from that period). He offered this advice to shareware game developers:

Be very sure you're ready to release the game. Unlike a commercial game, its very difficult to upgrade a shareware release. Bugs or undesirable features in an early version will continue to be perpetuated in outdated copies long after you release the revised code. Also, if you plan to move around, but stay in a certain city, be sure to use a PO box address on the game since there'll be no way to update your address once the game is released.