Elysium was to be a game to match the class of Ultimate’s Knightlore and Alien 8 games on the C64, using some rather cool programming techniques to get everything running to speed.
The developer had finished Imhotep, and started working on the game – without telling Ultimate at the time. You can see a very brief glimpse in the photo, but this could be all you ever see…
The game only reached the very beginnings of life, and eventually could well have been an Ultimate game in every way possible had it been completed.
Tim Stamper however (who didn’t know about the game) was trying to push the developer into producing games on the Spectrum, and the developer felt that the spectrum was a step backwards. He didn’t like the way Ultimate was thinking, and decided to part ways. As a result, the Ultimate styled game was never to see the light of day.
Sadly, the developer was not to keep hold of his work disks… so the remains could well be lost forever now. A huge
shame, as we could have potentially seen a game which proved that games like Alien 8 could work at good speed on a C64. We sadly don’t know much else about the game – no storyline as the game never really progressed that far.
Check out the photos though of the developer working on his long lost work… Shot is a close up showing development on Elysium.
We will keep this case open, but it’s one which is very hopeful to find… almost vapourware now…
Can anything be found, or is it case closed?…
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Creator speaks
Developer speaks about work on Elysium...
"All I have from that period is one original copy of each of my games, and that photo on Ultimate Wurlde of me developing a game post-BB 64 (which never did get completed, although if you look carefully at the screen, you’ll see it’s very Ultimate-ish – it was loosely based on Ultimate’s Knightlore and Alien8). I would have completed it, but Ultimate went pear-shaped and I moved on to other things.
The game only reached initial coding stage. It was called Elysium. I didn’t tell Ultimate I was doing it even though it was prime Ultimate genre stuff.
If Tim had ever said to me the C64 couldn’t handle that, I would have told him it was utter b*. Anything the speccy could do, the C64 could do without problems. Imhotep proved that.
Unfortunately, Tim was encouraging me to be a speccy programmer even as late as 1985. There was no way I was going to go there as the spectrum was getting long in the tooth by 85 and I had moved on to the Atari ST and Amiga.
I’m very surprised he didn’t ask me to work as a C64 porting programmer seeing as it was pretty evident I was pretty much a premier league C64 programmer by that time. Elysium had all the ‘shifting screen’ scrolling you mention and it didn’t even tickle the CPU."
