A rather obscure title to add into the vaults, and one which was discovered kinda by accident by GTW. Pete Wright is unknown really to the C64 world, but a blog entry we have recently uncovered showed that Pete was once working on a game for Martech called "Assassin".
He was working on this game with a friend called Darren at the age of around 14 and Martech pretty much signed up the game when they first saw it with a letter of intent to say that if they finished it off with more levels and come back, Martech would pay them and publish the game.
Sadly for reasons currently unknown until we get hold of Pete Wright, the game never did get published in the end.
We know little about the game itself, apart from the fact that it featured some cool parallax scrolling routines and at least more than 8 sprites in the game. Not much really to go on at this stage. Was it a simple space shoot em up?
Well, we hope to track down Pete very soon and find out more, and also see about trying to salvage the remains of this long lost game. It would be very interesting to see what could have been and just what this game was like.
More soon we hope, but we’ll keep you tuned :-)
Supporting content
Creator speaks
Pete Wright speaks about his game, taken from an old blog entry...
"I was 14 years old the last time I was this fine. My friend Dagwin (his name was actually Darren, but somehow he landed himself the nickname of Tarquin, which later morphed in the way teenage nicknames do into a Dagwin) came running up to me at school, grinning from ear to ear, clutching a piece of paper. A letter, from a company, to he and I. I don't know of many 14 year olds that get an awful lot of postal mail, let alone letters addressed to them personally from a company they admire. In our case, the top of the letter bore the word "MARTECH", a leading light in the newly formed UK games industry and bore a heading that said "Letter of Intent to publish".
Dagwin's brother was dating the school's former sex symbol, a tall leggy vision of beauty with long flowing blonde hair and deep blue eyes. That's all I remember about her; her hair and her eyes. I don't even recall her name. After leaving school she had landed herself a job at Martech as a secretary and PA to the company boss, Dave Martin, and through much begging, pleading and I'm sure one or two cash bribes via Dagwin's brother she had landed us a meeting at Martech to show Dave Martin the Commodore 64 game we were working on. It was a great meeting despite the 3 mile walk from Dagwin's house to their offices, despite having absolutely no sleep the previous evening, and despite puking all morning through nerves. We booted up our game, "Assassin", on the company demo Commodore 64 and walked Dave through the work we had done. It was early days at that point and our demo consisted really of two kids being really excited about actually being in the company's offices and walking him through Dagwin's hand drawn cartoons of the games main characters, and storyline, before I showed him the graphics on the live machine, complete with our awesome parallax scrolling routine, and of course way more than the 8 sprites the Commodore 64 was theoretically limited to displaying at once.
The result of that meeting was our letter of intent, a letter that stated if we carried on as we were, developed a couple of levels to the game and turned up back in Martech's offices within a few months, they'd pay us, and publish us. It was a dream come true, the start of a career we both thought. It didn't work out that way and we never got our own game published, but we did get to glimpse inside a successful games company and strike up friendships that lasted for quite some years. I actually bumped into Dave Martin a few years ago at ECTS in London and nearly fell over when he handed me a business card showing him to be the creative director of one of the UK's most successful video game publishers. He remembered every facet of the meetings, and we spent a few minutes catching up before going our separate ways.
The feeling I had way back then as a 14 year old with a dream about to come true is still indescribable. It was better than sex, and highly addictive. You know, if I had to liken it to anything, I'd say the impression it leaves is like the bad guy in Star Trek Generations and his insatiable craving to get back in the Nexus. It never left me, and when I entered the life of "Office based code monkey" 4 years later I knew that if I stayed in that office, or ones like it, for the rest of my life, I'd die with an aching sense of loss for not having gone after what I really wanted to do."
Pete Wright.
