Many of you will know and remember R.I.S.K! (or KRIS! as it was later renamed, probably due to legal reasons and connection with the board game) by The Edge back in the late 80s, created by both Chris and Tony West.
However, the game was taking a very different shape at the very beginning and wasn’t set in space at all. Within this early preview (which has been doing the rounds for years, but oddly we’ve overlooked it), you control a guy on planet earth who can get into a helicopter and jeep and fly around the map.
It seems the idea was to save prisoners in this early version by breaking them out of various prisons and taking them back home. This is compared to saving a set of scientists in the eventual released game.
What has become clear is that the West brothers were heavily inspired by Choplifter when they first embarked on creating RISK! and the game evolved from that point into something quite different that you may not have made the connection like now with the preview.
There isn’t a huge amount to do in the preview, but you can try out the vehicles and wander around the rather large map. It is an intriguing early glimpse at how the game could have been before a major overhaul.
Over a year or so, it seems that the game was constantly evolving, and we did a post some time ago regarding another early set of screens. We found another demo on Cory Kin’s disks, so we’ve pulled this here too in one place.
Hopefully some day we may get to learn more about it from the West brothers.
Supporting content
Available downloads
Gallery
Update history
01/05/23 – Addition of another prototype and magazine scans, merged from an old post we had.
