Brainleak was an arcade adventure type of game being developed with a point-and-click based system implemented into the game via a series of icons.
The game apparently had a very complex plot, which unfortunatly Jason Kelk does not remember. Information is a little thin for this game at the moment, apart from its existance of it being done on the C64.
The game was being done by Chris Young, who did Quota, which readers of C-Zone may remember. Chris tryed to sell it to "Bubble Bus", who unfortunatly fell through at that time.
When we got hold of Chris, he had the following to say:
"For our development environment, we started off with the Zeus assembler, then got the Commodore Disk based Assembler and then an amazing, for the time, PC based cross assembler.
Brainleak would have been done with Zeus. I got as far as some backgrounds and a little guy, who looked a lot like the man from ‘Mission Impossible’ wandering left and right. There was an elaborate back story which I can’t remember anything about! I do know it was originally going to be called ‘Mindprobe’
I did remember showing it to Bubble Bus at one of the Commodore Shows but it would have just been an early demo."
For reasons currently unknown, development stalled on the game and eventually it was shelved. GTW asked Chris if he would be able to dig out the game, but we had developments much sooner when borrowing disks from Chris’ brother Matt Young (Who worked on the C64 conversion of Bubbler) and found a disk with a rather oddly named file called "Roy.G.Biv". Jason Kelk confirmed to us that this was the name of the main character from the game "Starring Roy G. Biv…" which must be a recollection of part of the storyline. We had found a preview!
It seems that this was all there would of the game, though we are still hopeful that Chris may recover some more of the game. Overall its a simple proof of concept but one which was looking promising for its time. One other interesting thing that we did find was a disk sleive with a handdrawn picture for the game. We have scanned and included this in the archive!
But Jason Kelk tells GTW64 that the version we have found is the post-Bubble Bus version of the game. The original Bubble Bus version had a Shadowfire style control panel at the bottom, which was later scrapped in this later version which we have here. So there are some big variations out there still to be found. We have to hope that maybe Chris will still have his C64 disks.
A big thanks to Dave’s contact for tidying up the file (Credit coming up soon!)
It’s still a bit early days, but another game almost saved we think and only some loose ends to tie up it seems!
Contributions: Jason Kelk, Chris Young, Matt Young
