A brand new entry into the archives, and for a title you will never have heard of – and it was extremely close to release too. This is Void, by Tony Smales – a sideways scrolling Xevious clone of sorts.
The game was written by Tony largely as a way to learn how the Commodore 64 worked at low level after learning from Leo Scanlon’s 6502 Software Design book. He put the game on a disk and got his dad to drop it off at Beam Software. Fred Milgrom spoke with Tony and offered him a job. This was turned down, as Tony was still at school, so accepted part-time work and Beam/Software Licensing Marketing acquired the game.
A contract was signed and Tony got upfront payment on royalties for it from SLM. The game was complete with 4 levels and inlays were produced. It was intended as a budget release. Then SLM/Melbourne House was sold to Mastertronic, and as a result of that – there was a six month period where many titles that were contracted were never published. Void was sadly one of them.
Thankfully Tony had everything from the game still, and has kindly passed on a copy for us to add to the archive for you to check out for the very first time. We also have scans of inlays, and also receipts that Tony has provided. Tony also produced a map layout all on paper before coding it all up, and he made a test side by side video to show how it aligns – so we’ve added this too.
Thanks to Goat, we learn that the version we have from Tony is missing files for the 4th level, so is currently not complete. Tony then dug out the complete version and we’ve now added it. It now loops from level 4 to level 1 at the end.
All of this was thanks to This Week In Retro, who have done a great interview with Tony:
This was the starting point for Tony and which would lead him into a long career, and as a result – looks back fondly at the title and its origins. Now you can enjoy the game for yourself!
To finish off, we also have two videos that Tony shared which first shows an end to end play of the first level:
Then also one where Tony has tried to align his paper map of the first level alongside the first level – so you can see how closely the maps align to the original paper designs that he did:
Contributions: Tony Smales, This Week In Retro Podcast, Neil Thomas (The Retro Collective), Dr Ed Young, Goat
