A nice little sideways SEU created by Ashley Routledge and Dave Saunders (Ash and Dave). Featuring some neat (if strange) parallax scrolling and graphics, this game isn’t bad at all.
Although it’s no Armalyte, its still a decent game and features a great title screen, with a band playing to the title tune… typical of Ash and Dave styled demos. Jeroen Tel also provided some of his first C64 music for the game to add to the polish.
Originally, the game wasn’t going to be called Alloyrun, but Antaeus. However, after finding out that this was in fact a brand name of an aftershave, the name was scrapped quickly in favour of their second name, ‘Alloyrun’.
In its original Antaeus form, the game was submitted to Firebird for evaluation – but they rejected the game. In the end, Starlight would pick up the title and was to become the eventual publisher.
Although the game was actually completed and ready for release, Starlight ran into financial difficulties and were unable to pay Ash and Dave for their efforts. Therefore, both Ash and Dave would not allow Starlight release the game until they were paid. This never happened, and the game was subsequently canned.
It’s believed that Ash and Dave then, with no other publishers, released the game onto the scene for the sake of it. However, neither could recall doing so.
Recently in 2016, whilst digitally preserving Ashley Routledge’s work disks, a build of Alloyrun in the form of Antaeus was found fully working. It includes temporary Rob Hubbard tunes from Ace 2 and Firebird logos. It is probably the version that was pitched to Firebird. The game itself isn’t too different from the final version, but is a nice curiosity to see.
Then in June 2023, contributor Marcin ‘Tenchi’ Świętoniewski kindly provided a D64 image containing two different demos relating to the game, including different scroll texts and also a different arrangement of the title tune too which is in HVSC as Alloyrun V2. There is also a definitive version of the game that Marcin has kindly tidied up.
Contributions: Ian Osbourne, Chain, HVSC, Fix, Bieno, Martin Pugh, Jazzcat, Ashley Routledge, David Saunders, Nemo, Marcin 'Tenchi' Świętoniewski
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Marcin-Alloyrun-Compilation (zip)
- Preview_Antaeus (zip)
- Music_Alloyrunv2 (zip)
- Game_Alloyrun.zip (zip)
Gallery
Update history
- 27/06/23 – Added an extra archive download thanks to Marcin ‘Tenchi’ Świętoniewski
- 12/11/20 – Tidy up of the entry
- 22/03/17 – SFX credit added thanks to Nemo
- 23/12/16 – Added Antaeus early version of game.
- 30/06/14 – Added Jeroen Tel second version tunes.
