Pegasus had its beginnings in the basement of a kebab shop in Gravesend in Kent, where Chris Neary, who had done the graphics for The Evil Dead in 1983, along with Duncan Rigden and Stuart Brown, got together to make ‘the best game ever’.
The concept centred on a Wizard who transformed into a Pegasus to fly across a landscape, while being grounded when in Wizard form. When you were in your Wizard form you could enter houses and descend into an Underworld.
Sadly Stuart didn’t have the same enthusiasm for the project as Chris and Duncan and when he left the project faltered, until it was shelved and the programmers went on to other things.
The most interesting thing to come out of the project is the fact that a very similar concept was released by Palace Software, who Chris had worked for before starting Pegasus, that went on to become a huge seller and a classic of the 80s 8-bit home computer scene. It’s name? Cauldron.
Cauldron features a witch, who flies on a broom or is grounded in a similar way to the Wizard in Pegasus. The fact that some of the graphics Chris made for Halloween, another Game That Wasn’t, were reworked for Cauldron without his knowing adds to the mystery.
That said however, if Chris had already left Palace by the time Pegasus was conceived it’s hard to see how they could have stolen his idea, but the similarities are thought provoking.
Sadly for us though, it seems nothing remains of Pegasus for us to judge for ourselves the similarities, unless Stuart Brown has some code or Duncan Rigden, the artist for the project, has some archived concept art.
Do you know any more about this game?…
Contributions: Chris Neary
