A potentially stunning SEU was in development back in 1988, not specifically for Elite Software, but seeing as the game’s two developers were working at Elite, we can see where they wished the game had gone.
Richard Underhill struck up a friendship with Paul Walker, a talanted graphics artist at Elite, and they began work on a shoot-em-up called Quanta.
According to Richard, this game featured a real fast sprite multiplexer, parallax star-fields, huge opponents on one level, but then the second level would allow you to land onto a giant cruiser and go into a Paradroid style arena to disable that cruiser.
This could have possibly been one of top SEU titles on the C64, along with the likes of Armalyte and Delta.
Sadly, Elite were not interested and only wanted convertable games which could go on all the 8-bits. Even though this game was shaping up into something special, that was Elite’s view and that was it.
Richard and Paul couldn’t do it part time, so the game died and that was that.
Sadly Richard does not have the game no longer, but Paul Walker could possibly still have some old work. Otherwise the title could be lost forever.
Possibly a massive loss for Elite…
Contributions: Richard Underhill
Supporting content
Creator speaks
Richard Underhill speaks about work on Quanta...
"I was at Elite at the time and struck a friendship with an Artist called Paul Walker.
I’d started on the, let’s see how far we can take the C64 ramblings again. A real fast sprite multiplexer, parallax star-fields, huge opponents in a side scrolling shoot-em-up (which were basically animating backgrounds over a star-field), but it looked incredible for the time. We had a second stage, where you would land on giant cruisers and then go into a Paradroid style arena to disable that ship, with a lovely full screen eight-way scroll.
I would have loved Elite to pick it up, but no, they wanted Overlander instead. They weren’t interested in single format games.- a crying shame. We could have continued I suppose, but it would have been a lot of part-time work and Arc was already on the horizon!
imho it would have been better than Armalyte and Delta - you had full screen enemies similar to Nemesis et al and could land on enemy fortresses into a gauntlet / paradroid (my favourite game of the C64 era)style arena and then......
I'd love to send you a demo - but I'm sure there's no trace of it now..."
Richard Underhill.
