Another game which was promised at the end of the C64’s commercial life. As games ceased up,there was news of many more games coming our way.
Solaris was one such title which was being created by C64 muscian Andrew (Drew) Rodger. Andrew was previously famous for his Terminus demo, and his wide range of music he did for companies such as Zeppelin Games. His programming ability was as good as his music abilities.
The game was simply described and mentioned once as “a heart-attack inducing single screen blaster!” in issue 47 of Commodore Format. For years we tried to get hold of Andrew, but however thanks to Andrew Fisher, we got in touch with Andrew in 2013 and find that sadly the game never really got off the ground.
Out of the 3 titles, Solaris is the title which Andrew is least familiar with – though strangely he believes he coded the most for it. It is believed to be a fixed screen blaster in the style of Galaga or Vyper on the Amiga.
The game sadly didn’t get too far, but Andrew is hoping to check his disks very soon and see if there is anything to be saved.
Check out the creator speaks section for now, but could potentially be a case closed very soon it seems!
Contributions: Andrew Fisher, Andrew Rodger
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Creator speaks
Andrew Rodger speaks about work on Solaris:
“Solaris is the title I’m least familiar with, yet strangely I think I spent more time coding it than the other two games. From memory, it was a fixed screen blaster in the style of Galaga in the arcades or Vyper on the Amiga.
Again, I need to sift through old floppies to find out what the hell I was thinking of with this one!
By 1994, the C64 market was very small. I had tried to get my head around 68000 assembly code on the Amiga but I couldn’t get the hang of it, so the C64 was still the only machine I could program. I guess I convinced myself I could be a big fish in a small pond. With hindsight I should have concentrated on one game instead of three – that’s the danger of getting bored with one idea and starting another, then another and so on – that’s how you end up finishing nothing, which is exactly what happened!”
