Already we have a few entries in GTW which are Apex based games, and here is another one. Not too much to say at present, apart from that this was a game being developed around 3 years before Creatures in around 1989.
The actual game itself isn’t really well known, and all we have is the following quote from Apex from the Mayhem diaries (part 1).
“This was a game which we designed three years before Creatures and was in the playable demo stages before we decided to abandon the project (because of the technical limitations of the C64). Since its initial design we’ve developed it into an awesome game, which is unfortunately just in our heads. Ho Hum. Look out for it on a more powerful machine in the future. Virtual Reality would be nice.”
Indeed it sounds very interesting, and we hope to find out more from the Rowlands about this game. Was it a space game?… Was it a cute game?… We don’t know just yet.
Well, thanks to an unpublished Apex interview intended for issue one of Commodore Format, we learn the following:
“After RETROGRADE was completed, the lads took a well-earned break from the programming scene, during which they rustled up several ideas for their next project. Many of these were later coded into short demos. They included GENESIS (a two player shoot ’em up based on a vast parallax play area), a WARDNER type platform game, a SPACE WARS clone with countless bolt-on weapons, plus a technically excellent parallax scrolling routine (which was sadly never developed into a game). All of these ideas fell by the wayside.”
So a bit more detail – a two player shoot’em up based on a vast parallax play area – so perhaps a top down multi-directional scrolling game? Does anything of the early demo still exist?
More soon we hope…
Contributions: Andrew Fisher, Anonymous Contributor, Commodore Format Archive
Supporting content
Update history
23/10/24 – Small bit of information about the game from an old interview.
