Games That Weren't^®

A big thanks to Paul Drury for flagging this up for GTW after a recent Retro Gamer magazine article with Larry DeMar.

After Vid Kidz had delivered Stargate to Williams, Larry had begun working on a new project called “Conquest”

Larry recalls: I didnt get very far as Robotron got so interesting, so quickly, I jumped off Conquest to join Eugene on that. You were a ship roughly in the centre of a screen of a 2D universe. It played with controls like Omega Race; you had a wheel for your rotation and then thrust and fire. It was quite elegant and had a scanner for the space but then we heard Sinistar was in development, so we put it to one side and never finished it. If wed concentrated on it, we probably wouldve beaten Sinistar to market by a year.

Larry kept the source code and Retro Gamer originally printed some exclusive screenshots from this intriguing lost title. Paul has passed higher quality shots from the article which you can check out below in our gallery.

Larry additionally had to add: “The ship that we created for this prototype (which would have been replaced) was an homage to the ship from Computer Space.

The Red and Yellow globs on the upper right are the players shots which were animated fireballs. The circles is the explosion of a planet which is in progress. This program which generated these circular explosions was the same one we later used to create the Time Tunnel in Blaster. There was very little game here. At this point I had created the 2-D scrolling world, the ship control, the scanner, the ship’s fireball shots, the collision detection and explosions and enemy tracking for end of wave. At this point we learned about Williams Sinistar project and put it on the shelf.”

Many thanks to Paul Drury for the information, and Larry DeMar for originally talking to Paul and sharing information on his long lost game.

Gallery for Conquest