Thanks to contributor Chris Hester, who flagged up an old piece that he wrote possibly for his magazine Adventure Coder. Pyramids Of The Sun was the follow-up to Castle Blackstar, and was set for release in October 1984.
Chris’ feature found a snipped from January 1985 where the programmer Mark Sheppard sheds light on the game, confirming it is set in Egypt (and not in space!) and makes a lot of use of Egyptian mythology. It would be only second to the legendary Infocom games in its ability to understand English inputs.
The game never saw release on any platform by the looks of it, so was it cancelled early on or did the developers just move onto pastures new?
Well, contributor Strident has found that the game was still being mentioned as late as 1988, with a release by CRL on multiple platforms. This was listed in the Adventure Club Ltd dossier and the release shifted to October 1988. The game just disappeared after this point.
What happened to it?
Contributions: Chris Hester, Strident
Supporting content
Update history
05/04/21 – Details of CRL added thanks to Strident.
It feels like CRL were ultimately responsible for 75% of all the promised text adventures that never materialised… Certainly most of the ones that I’ve been researching recently!
It was still being mentioned as late as 1988, for a release by CRL on multiple platforms.
For example, see this news article in the Adventure Club Ltd dossier.
https://archive.org/details/vgmuseum_advclub_advclub31-32/page/n17/mode/2up?q=%22pyramid+of+the+sun%22
I think the release was shifted to October 1988 and that was the last we heard of it.
Thanks Strident, just updated the page now. Interesting to see how long it was dragging on for. Perhaps CRL brought it from the old company and were trying to update it a little.