Thanks to Sailor of Triad, a rare prototype of Alien 3 for the Commodore 64 has just been discovered recently. This was a demo that was seemingly produced for producer Joe Bonar to take a look at back in the day to see progress with the project.
It is possible that it could have been also passed onto magazines for screenshots – which makes it a shame that it wasn’t included as a demo on the likes of Commodore Force or Format at the time.
We think the demo was recovered from Michael Archer’s source code release of Alien 3 on Github several years ago, but will try and clarify as soon as we can. The prototype has a number of differences compared to the final game – namely:
- The title screen has a different logo, with “Alien III” instead of “Alien 3”
- There is variation on the title screen text.
- There is a different colour scheme on the levels (within the DEMO folder of the source repository, a note to Joe suggests that you originally could press F1 and F3 to change colours, but this doesn’t seem to work).
- Timer lengths are different for each of the difficulties.
- Tries option doesn’t work in the demo version.
There might be other differences – if you spot any, please let us know. It is great to see something different regarding the game, and its with a huge thank you to Sailor for recovering and getting it all working.
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