Commodore 64 Concept Art, published and Abandon-ware Part 3

Between the release of Hades Nebula in 1987 and me joining Sci in 1989, we (Paranoid Software) were eager for our next game release, but with the funding drying up, we had little resources or time. That didn't stop me sketching out lots of ideas and producing plenty of pixel work.

ENEMY

Enemy was our attempt at an R-Type / Nemesis style game. That was my sketch for the title screen, and the Koala Pad drawing. 

I believe I finished the graphics for all the levels and sprites. And Stuart Cook did code some of the game, but I don't think it was ever finished. 

Thanks to the amazing detective work of Frank Gasking and Darren Melbourne, there is some downloadable content at the Games That Weren't website. 

DUEL

This was such a cool idea. I loved Defender and Dropzone on the C64, but I was also really addicted to the two player action of Archon and Ballblazer. So I mashed the ideas together for a split screen, two player Defender style game. It had nice, multi-layer parallax scrolling ground and simple, instantly appealing gameplay. I don't remember it ever being coded, but apparently it was, and there's a playable download at Games That Weren't 

EXODUS

Now this is where my memory gets blurred. I was about 18/19 now, so hormones and alcohol had taken over from basic brain functions. There are other accounts of how it went down from Rick Paynter and Darren Melbourne

I think I was now working at Sci. I'd done some pixel work on an un-released Commodore 64 port of Kid Nikki: Radical Ninja. Then I spent some time designing this Uridium / Defender style game. It was a left-right scroller and you had to defend a fleet of ships, like the rag-tag fleet from Battlestar Galacitca, from space pirates that would try to drill through the hulls of the colony ships.

When we learned that the name Exodus had already been used, it got renamed as Long Haul, and there was another title which I forget. Coding wise, it was about half finished by Rick Paynter. Game That Weren't has some downloads.

Max E Tuff

My memory is pretty sketchy about this. We had always planned a sequel to Hades Nebula with platform game stages. This started off as a twist where you played the bad guy, A fallen Emperor Hades. We wanted the gameplay to be like Rygar and Shaolin's Road. 

The idea got put on hold while I worked on Duel, but Darren Melbourne had been writing for a character called Mr Max E Tuff so we then decided to base the game around that. 

I did this one drawing of how it could look in the game. It was planned for the Commodore 64, but when we started working at Sci in 1989, the idea was put on a back-burner.

Many years later, this idea evolved into (an also un-published) Mr. Tuff for the Snes.

All these drawings have been discovered while trawling through my loft, but this is just the tip of the iceberg! Luckily, I kept most of my drawing pads and note-books from my time at Sci, so I have all my sketches and notes that I made during the development of SWIV. 

In my next series I'll dive deep into SWIV and other Amiga games that never were....