Rapid Steel

Diamond Bytes

Status: Preview, Findability: 5/5

What we have here with our next GTW entry is Miles Barry’s first C64 game which was started while Jason Kelk and Nigel Smith were crashing over his place for a week.

The majority of superb graphics were done by Jason (TMR) Kelk, with a main sprite and paper based level designs by Nigel. Infact, its been recently found that the walker sprite is actually by Robin Levy and was borrowed from the early Armalyte previews that did the rounds! Jason is fairly sure thinking back that Nigel had originally shown them the same sprite editor.

Originally the game started out as an advert in Zzap64 by Nigel, as he wanted to have this particular game written. Miles contacted Nigel and joined forces with to create this game. Both Miles and Jason took over the project, and controlled the majority of it once Nigel arrived at Miles house for the week. Unfortunately the game was not to last really past the week that was spent on it. It is possible that Nigel went on and finished off the game elsewhere according to Jason.

The game therefore consists of a well animated Ed209 based sprite which walks left and right on a horizontally scrolling screen with some smart initial looking graphics. It is not playable as such, with no sprites to look at apart from the main character and nothing really to do. It is at a very early stage.

The loading screen itself came after Jason arrived back home, and was inspired by Ed209 from Robocop.

The game, if finished, was to be published by Diamond Bytes, which was rumoured to be a software house offspring of Commodore Disk User, which didn’t get very far. Apex Images was infact Cosine and Nigel, but the name soon died out as they discovered that there was an Apex already out there.

There is no more of this game to be found, apart from possibly any other bits of work from Nigel himself, or even the paper designs he did. Maybe if Nigel can be found, he can shed some light on this title and maybe even tell us what happened next.

An interesting title which will be examined more in the future….

Nice early development of a promising title…

Contributions: Jason Kelk

Supporting content

Available downloads

Creator speaks

Jason (TMR) Kelk speaks about work on Rapid Steel...

"This is Miles Barry's first C64 game, started whilst Nigel and I were crashing at his place for a week. Barring the player sprite, all the onscreen graphics were done by me with Nigel supplying the overall look of the level on paper (all the graphics were designed for a game he was wanting to create, Miles had contacted him through an advert in Zzap! 64 and we took over somewhat when he arrived! =-) and the project didn't last much past that week. i'm not sure what Nigel went on to do, he might have got his actual game finished...

The loading screen came a little later, about a week after i got home from Miles's place; the walker robot was based very roughly on the shape of Ed 209 from the original Robocop (in fact, i got a still frame with my VCR of Ed from the scene where he's first introduced to the board of OCP and used that as a reference). Diamond Bytes was, if my very poor memory serves, an abortive offspring of Commodore Disk User into the realm of software publishing and Apex Images was the Cosine team and Nigel, the name died out pretty much as soon as we realised that there was already an Apex out there!"

Jason Kelk .

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