A short entry for what is a significant earlier version of Paradroid, which was revealed by Andrew Braybook via Twitter.
The screenshots below come from Andrew’s negative archive, showing an early version with the player’s gun-sight that moves along in front of the player, or independently. It allowed for instant hits, but it was not easy to get it to hit moving targets during testing. Andrew had two different gun-sight variants before it was swapped out for a more standard firing system.
There are also many different screens showing the abandoned “fish-bone” design that was originally created. Also a series of other screens – some of which were from the final game, perhaps with minor differences.
Andrew had passed on the screens to Fusion Books to include within the excellent The Graftgold Story book. We respectfully held back from adding the fish-bone design screens to this page until the book was published at Andrew’s request – and now we’ve been given the go ahead thanks to the book’s designer, Steven Day.
The question was whether anything of these earlier builds may still exist today, and Andrew wasn’t so confident. They didn’t tend to keep old builds, as there were bug fixes and tuning alterations all the time. There is the possibility that a demo does exist on a disk somewhere, but it could well be gone for good.
However, these polaroid scans are a fascinating look at how Paradroid evolved up until its release and Gold Medal review.
With a huge thank you to both Andrew Braybrook and Steve Day, and please check out the excellent The Graftgold Story book.
Contributions: Andrew Braybrook
