Another exciting title from the authors of Armalyte, Cyberdyne Systems.
This time we were to be treated with a sooped up version of Sinistar from the arcades, with an awesome looking starfield effect and some superb graphics by Rob Levy. All the code was being done by John Kemp while Deadlock was being worked on.
This was not a title with any particular publisher in mind, but was a small project which was being worked on while other games like Armalyte and Deadlock were mainstream.
In the end as projects died and other projects were assigned, Scimitar was long forgotten and shelved.
In recent times, Dan Phillips was digging out remains from his old disks and has kindly provided most for GTW. Scimitar originally proved slightly harder to find, with Dan not being able to provide any kind of Binary. However, John Kemp has all of his disks for his C128. In this batch was believed to be remains of Scimitar.
In December 2010, Robin Levy posted down some disks from himself and John, and one was labelled with Scimitar. And sure enough there was an executable showing a tech demo with the main ship and an impressive starfield!
It is VERY early though we must add, and apart from moving around the starfield (which is excellent) and controlling the cool main ship, there isn’t much to do. Also the background is dark grey for some reason rather than black.
We are not sure if this is as far as the game ever progressed, there could well be a more advanced version out there – but we need John/Robin to confirm.
But after the initial mentions of the game in the Cyberdyne article back in 1990 time, the game has been found in what may well be its final state!… Well worth checking out!
Enjoy, and we hope to learn more about this Cyberdyne game soon!…
Contributions: Dan Phillips, Rob Levy, John Kemp
