A mysterious game created by Simon Birrell which was originally penned as a game for the BBC Micro. However, Virgin Games decided that they also wanted this title completed on the C64. The BBC game can be seen here btw…
The game involves having to shoot baddies with a balloon which you blow up and then let go of within a maze like structure. Not quite a horror game as you might expect! :)
The game was fully converted onto the C64, but for reasons unknown it never quite made it out. Hopefully Simon will be able to shed some light on this very soon.
For now there is not a lot of information on the game, apart from that it exists fully on the BBC micro and you can play it for yourselves.
Well, recently we checked out some disks from Simon and found a disk with remains of the game on. The game was made executable as much as possible by soundis. Unfortunately the game is quite bugged and isn’t really playable. This is mainly due not knowing what the game was coded in originally.
If the compiler could be found out (Which sadly Simon cannot recall) the source code potentially on the disk (and in downloads) could be made to create a version without the graphical glitches or bugs.
This seems to be all that was left of the game, so we are very close now to closing the case on this one!… But at the very least something has been found! :-)
A neat little game that for reasons unknown never made it…
Contributions: Simon Birrell
Supporting content
Available downloads
Gallery
Creator speaks
Simon Birrell speaks about work on High Rise Horror…
“I wrote this on both the C64 and the BBC Micro. One of them was released on the Rabbit label (owned by Virgin at that point), but I can’t for the life of me remember which one. It was my last BBC game, and Virgin asked me to port it so that I could learn the C64. That was just before I joined them as an employee, in my “year off” between school and university. I had already programmed and released “Microbe” and “Bug Bomb” which you can read about on the Stairway to Hell website.
Being 18, I had a year off before university. I moved to London and worked for Virgin for a year as an in-house programmer. I wrote a C64 game, my best, called “Strangeloop”. This was a free adaptation of a Spectrum game of the same name, written by a guy who later became a close friend.
It was the first game where I didn’t do my own graphics. (I just downloaded a copy off the net that was cracked in 1985 and played it in an emulator!)”
Simon Birrell.
