The Adventures That Didn't Quite Make It. By Richard Hewison. I thought some of you might be interested to hear about a few of those mythical pieces of software that have disappeared without a trace over the years. You know the sort - they get previewed and the release date slips by a few years and then they vanish, never to be heard of again. Here are a few adventure or strategy related products that disappeared whilst I was working for Rainbird Software... Cast your minds back to 1988. A number of people were crying out for an adventure writing system for the Atari ST. STAC wasn't on the scene yet, nor was AGT or TADS. To try and fill this gap a programming language was being developed by John Jones Steele for Rainbird Software (then part of the British Telecom empire). Internally it was known as R.A.I.L. which was an acronym for the Rainbird Adventure Interpreter Language. At the time of development it hadn't been decided whether to release the package immediately or publish a few adventures created with it first. You could have various containers of different sizes, volumes, colours, weight etc. which could all be distinguished by the parser. Graphics would have been allowed as well as huge compressed text files. Once the language was published, the plan was to release new library disks of routines every so often, (remember that this was a language (like AGT or TADS) and not a system like The Quill or STAC). Unfortunately, R.A.I.L got a little bogged down and became very late. It was never advertised or previewed so nobody missed it when it became commercially unviable. Who knows what it might have spawned if it had been published? Rainbird was also going to publish The Acrobat, which was a 16 bit only adventure presented in the form of a comic book. Written by the same author who wrote the adventure comic book Red Hawk and Kwah! for Melbourne House on 8 bit (Spectrum, CPC and C64) it failed to live up to the possible potential that a game like that could have - given the right user interface, graphics and puzzles. Once again it was never previewed or advertised so the losses were cut and the product disappeared altogether. The main problem was that the graphics were very poor (monochromatic) and no better than their 8 bit predecessors. The puzzles that were already in were illogical and far too easy to solve and the whole thing was incredibly uninspiring. E.P.T was going to be a large epic 3D space opera. The acronym stood for Elite P*** Take and a new name was chosen just before it was dropped. Everyone in the company was asked to suggest a name and someone came up with Frontier. As luck would have it, this name was chosen just before it became clear that the game was far too ambitious a project to complete. The 3D graphics system was very impressive but it was trying to be a bit too realistic. For example, to cross from one solar system to another you would have to go into suspended animation to effectively speed up time. If you didn't, you could do it in realtime instead which would require a couple of hundred thousand years travelling at the theoretical speed of light. As a interesting point, the official sequel to Elite is called Frontier. Coincidence? Mindware were a company who wrote a game for Rainbird on ST, Amiga and Mac called Tracker. Their next design was going to be Dungeon Master style. At this time (1988) there were none of the DM clones we're swamped with today. The name of the game was 'Lasers and Labyrinths' and the graphics were being drawn by Terry Greer (who did the graphics for early 8 bit adventures like The Heroes of Karn and The Jewels of Babylon). L & L was a science fiction RPG which started aboard the Searcher Seven mother-ship, parked at a safe distance from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The game involved visiting the various asteroids and solving small quests and returning to the ship intact. If a player's character died, a new one would be grown from embryos in a chamber back on board the mother-ship. Apart from the normal capabilities the player's characters would also have extra PSI abilities like mind reading and the like. The game had the same views as Dungeon Master but had space ship corridors and aliens hatching out all over the place. Some of you might think that this sounds a little familiar and you would be right. Mindware unfortunately went out of business and Lasers and Labyrinths vanished. However, the graphics didn't. Terry Greer was free to take them elsewhere and so he approached Pandora, who wrote a game around the graphics and it eventually appeared as Xenomorph in mid 1989. The Electronic Pencil company had a graphic adventure system on the go for a while called Broadsword. It involved a band of adventurers wandering around corridors and fighting monsters in a pseudo-isometric environment. Ultimately the system just didn't work and it never got up to the playable stage. It sounded very interesting from the specification though. Mike Singleton had a superb specification for converting his old play by mail game Starlord to 16 bit machines. When MicroProse took Telecomsoft over the project was advertised but nothing has happened since. Mike Singleton is now working with Mirage and having recently finished 'Ashes of the Empire' (another Midwinter style epic) his next game is Galacticon. Starlord was truly going to be epic. A few pictures of the work done appeared in some of the magazines a few years ago. The only part of the game that had been programmed when I last saw it was the strategic computer simulator. You could program in orders to your battle fleets and then run it as a simulation to see if the strategy worked or not. Your space ships would follow orbital paths and you would see them attacking their targets unless something came closer in which case they would aim their fire at the new target. Once that was destroyed they would return to concentrate on the original target. You effectively used a mini programming language built up of IF, THEN and ELSE style commands. It was highly technical and very complicated to use. The specification though made tremendous reading from what I can remember. You had to ultimately become Starlord, ruler of the galaxy. To achieve this you could make allegiances with certain systems, invade and take over others, complete a holy quest and become leader of a religious cult (enlarging your armies considerably as a result), go on a holy war, marry an ally's daughter to form a pact - the choices were seemingly endless. Although the game wasn't even written we began formulating playing tactics from the written spec. For example, if you could locate and take control of the four data stars, then you could tap into the enemy's computer system and see his battle strategies immediately prior to a war. Then you would download this info into your own simulator and replay the battle over and over again until you had a strategy that defeated his. In theory it would assure a victory every time. It's just a shame that it was never developed far enough for us to try it out. As far as I know, Starlord is still contracted to MicroProse but it seems very unlikely that it will now ever appear. Out of all of the products I have mentioned in this article, Starlord was the one I was desperate to play when it was finished. From the above you can see that with just one publisher an Elite style space game, a text entry adventure language, a comic book adventure, a Dungeon Master style RPG, and an epic space strategy game all met their untimely ends. I'll reveal a few more next time. Lastly, if anyone has any questions about the inner workings of the industry or a publisher or anything about game development, please write to SynTax and I'll try and answer them for you if I can.