Tau Ceti was very well received, and received game of the year awards. Created by Pete Cooke on the Spectrum, John Twiddy was allocated the task of converting to the C64, which he did an
excellent job of.
Once complete, John really saw the potential in the game being extended, and tried to convince CRL to let him work on a new sequel called ‘Attack On Centralis’. John was convinced that he could use some techniques from Paul Woakes’ Encounter to speed up the game considerably and make something a lot better than the original.
CRL sadly turned down the idea, possibly because they knew that Pete was working on an official sequel and were waiting for that instead. It isn’t known how far John got with his sequel, or if he even started the game. No doubt that John probably had a
few test routines running which demonstrated what he could have done.
It would have been interesting to line this up against the official sequel which did well… but sadly we never saw the C64 version of that either. Check out the review to read more.
As with Academy, we need a lot of information on this title. Most of the information was taken from a conversation with Andrew Fisher and is a collaboration of information from various sources. Hopefully in the future we will be able to track down John
Twiddy and find out more.. though that is proving rather harder than we thought. Can anyone help us track down John and get us in touch?
More to come on this game we hope……
Contributions: Brendan Phoenix
Interview with John Twiddy in Zzap! issue 19 where he talks about this game Pages 86 & 87)
Thanks very much Brendan, just adding now :)