Back in 1985, CU reviewed Nexus for the C64 under the Beyond label, but it never surfaced.
In June 1986, CU did a preview of the game and explained that the original game was held up as Beyond were taken over by BT. Programmers Paul Voysey and Tayo Olowu decided hat they didn’t want to work for Buzby and set up their own company. Beyond bosses Bill Delaney and Clive Bailey decided to go with them and a new software company was born and they called it Nexus.
In the year between leaving Beyond and the launch of Nexus, the developers had been busy totally re-working the game and adding a in a lot of different and original features.
Now what happened to the original game?
Well, after sifting through Cory Kin’s disks, we found a preview of the game which is labelled with Beyond Software as the disk name. This indeed is the version which was due for release on Beyond’s label. It is already in CSDB in cracked form, but this is the uncracked version which we have found with all the files separated out. CSDB’s entry suggests that the game may have been called “Killer” in the beginning, but its likely that a hack was made of the preview with a new name.
It is heavily bugged, and you cannot do a huge amount. Some of the digitized faces are different too, but you can see the game taking shape. It isn’t as hugely different as anticipated. The interface is quite different though.
We hope some day to talk to Paul and Tayo to find out a bit more about this early version. But check it out for yourselves!
