Paul Baker is not necessarily a name you may recognize straight away, but he was the coder of Ghostbusters 2, Jet Boys and Road Warrior – but also the Empire Strikes Back game which we’ve had in the GTW archives for some time.
Starswarm was another title by Paul which was never to see the light of day properly – we don’t know exactly why either. Presentation and game was looking to be shaping up pretty well – CRL would have happily snapped the game up i’m sure. Well, neither CRL or any other company did – so we guess that Paul just decided to release it into the wild and onto Compunet.
Was there anything more to the game than just this preview? Who was the game actually intended for?
Steven Day suggests that Starswarm was uploaded onto CNet and suggests it was probably just a tech demo to send out looking for work. According to Steven, CNet was jammed with them in the 87 period – suggesting that Empire Strikes Back and Goldrunner were similar stories too.
Paul Baker could be a hard character to try and track down to find out more, but we’ll see. It is hoped that some day we will find out exactly what the intentions were for this game.
Contributions: Steven Day
