So this is where Drew (Terminus) Rodger got to.. After his musical exploits for Zeppelin and Virgin, Drew turned his attention to the games market as the scene dwindled away. At the time, Commodore Format featured a huge games explosion.
This was to be a cross between Doctor Who and Paradroid, planned to the delight of the scene (and Dave Golder!). It was a relief to see Drew back in the lime light after a spell at Zeppelin doing music for games such as Arnie 2, and who was known to be great at coding too after his impressive Terminus demo.
It was never quite known what happened with this game and the 2 others which were also in development.
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. The gameplay would have been influenced by the soldiers vs cybermen fight scenes in the Dr Who stories ‘Earthshock’ and ‘The Invasion’.
It could not be recalled if the game would have been 8-directional or vertical, but the game would have push scrolled. The paradroid reference Andrew felt referred to the player’s handicap of not being able to see around corners. Graphics were inspired by the tilted view point of 1984 arcade game Equites (which also inspired Andrew’s SEUCK effort Terravision).
Not much was done really apart from a few test graphics and an animating Cyberman head which was to be downgraded to the C64. It is believed that no code ever existed. However, 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!
“Regarding Cyber Attack, gameplay would have been influenced by the soldiers vs Cybermen fight scenes in the Doctor Who stories ‘Earthshock’ and ‘The Invasion’, both of which I’d just bought on VHS around that time (1993-94), so that was a major influence. I can’t remember if the game was going to contain eight-directional or vertical scrolling, but it would have been push as opposed to forced. The Paradroid reference in the GTW64 summary refers to the player’s handicap of not being able to see around corners, which I think was a particularly ingenious feature of Andrew Braybrook’s classic game and one I wanted to re-use.
The graphics (and probably some gameplay elements) would have been inspired by the slightly tilted viewpoint of the 1984 Alpha-Denshi shoot-em-up Equites (it was also a major influence on one of my SEUCK games, Terravasion) – still a favourite coin-op game of mine and one I spent most of my school dinner money on circa 1985. On an Amiga disk somewhere I have a Deluxe Paint animation of a Cyberman turning his head, which was destined to be downgraded to the C64 palette for the game but never made it that far.
I don’t think any code ever existed for Cyber Attack. Ref. the name ‘Robotronics’, I wanted something that sounded a bit like ‘International Electromatics’ from ‘The Invasion’. Being a Eugene Jarvis fan probably influenced the title too.
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!”
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