Renegade was was an attempt to push the Robotron style of multi-directional shoot-’em-up into more advanced territory, and on the C64 in particular!
The game was to borrow heavily from the movie Aliens. It featured interconnected rooms filled with eggs, with hatching aliens attacking the player from all directions. It was very similar to Smash TV and Alien Breed, both of which appeared a couple of years later, and graphically pretty impressive – not least because it featured huge numbers of sprites on screen at once.
Unfortunately Clifford was really getting bored with programming by this point in time and so Renegade, along with a Dungeons & Dragons style game he’d also spent a few weeks developing, got left on the shelf. (Ironically he re-entered the industry in the mid-’90s after a stint in computer journalism and now works as a programmer at Microsoft’s Rare studios.)
The game never had a publisher confirmed – it was a case of writing the game first and then trying to find a publisher. As for the game itself, sadly there is nothing remaining any longer. The C64 disks with the data are long gone. It would have been fun to compare to Alien Breed. Although Alien Breed had a top down view, the Ramshaw’s game would have had a semi-3D view point (i.e above and down) on a humble C64.
A sad end to what seems an impressive game… case closed…
Contributions: Mark Ramshaw
