Commodore 64 Concept Art, published and Abandon-ware Part 2

HADES NEBULA

Sometime in 1985/1986, Myself (Ned Langman), Darren Melbourne and the rest of us, when not wandering aimlessly around the streets of Welling, would hit the arcades and pile all our cash into games like Xevious, Slap Fight and, best of all, Star Force - an intense space shoot-em-up.

Starforce

Uridium - C64

And when Uridium came out on the C64 in 1986, we were inspired, under the name Paranoid Software (taken from Space Paranoids in Tron) to make Hades Nebula for the Commodore 64 with me on pixel duty and Mark Greenshields coding. Nexus Software published it in 1987.

Recently I found loads of concept art in my attic. This one was supposed to be one of the end of level bosses.

It makes me laugh to read all the notes now! I was only about 17. But it was the law in those days to have a cheesy back-story. And we were hoping to do lots of sequels.

Everyone was obsessed with gray-scale shading back then, so all games had embossed slabs or metal spheres. Sadly, I gave the wrong colour palette data to Mark, so the climactic end of game boss, Emperor Hades' ship (pictured above) was in inverted colours and looked all corrupted!

That big guy with the gun is not Thanos! It's the big bad Emperor Hades. We were going to have platform shooter levels in the sequel, but that idea mutated into something else.

Aw bless, I remember being really pleased with that when I did it! Just as well I had a day-job. I do remember us all being very excited when we saw the box artwork. Having your first game published and seeing it in the shops was such a high, even if the game was balls-hard to play. 

Also, special respect to the late Ben Daglish who composed the excellent music, which I think might be the thing people remember most about the game, but that's cool by me!

In Part 3: Commodore 64 games that weren't