Xenon 2

1991 Mirrorsoft

Platform: ZX Spectrum 128k

Back in 1991, C64 developer and musician Dave Spicer decided to put together a technical demo for a potential conversion of Xenon 2 for the ZX Spectrum.

xenon2 640 1

What was produced was pretty stunning – with a 25 fps scrolling demo that was full-screen and featured some very nice graphics by Jason Brashill.  Even though they were quite minimal to give a feel of the game, they still looked amazing at that early stage.

Unfortunately, Mirrorsoft were not keen on doing any 8-bit conversions, so turned down the submission.   At a slightly later date, Dave added parallax scrolling to match the 16-bit conversions, which slowed the game down slightly.

The plan was to send both this new version and the faster version without parallax scrolling to Your Sinclair magazine to try and publicize the conversion and hopefully drum up interest to get Mirrorsoft to reconsider.  Sadly it didn’t happen, and as a result the game was cancelled.

Some 30 years or so since, the demos have finally been digitally preserved and Dave has made video available of the game in action. Not long afterwards, the demos were released for people to check out, so we have added to the entry here to download too.

xenon2 640 2

You can also read about various rumours and details of a C64 conversion that seemingly never was. With thanks to Dave Spicer for the details about his development and preserving his work.

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2 Responses to Xenon 2

    • You did some pretty good stuff Dave :) … Just realised i’ve missed your name out alongside that line too (not entirely sure how) – will fix that now.

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