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Michael J
L
speaks about work on Jailbreak...
"Here's
a long lost game that was never finished. Written by myself (Wanderer).
I was a programmer for the C64 under groups like Rampar and The
Survivors. I live in Canada, this game was released without copyright,
via BBS to North America. It was never finished and never really made it
anywhere.
As a coder on the C64 I have always been fascinated with how other
people's games worked. There were so many games that were entertaining
and challenging that you wouldn't want to put down the joystick.
When I tried to write games, they weren't challenging to me because I
knew how the code worked and how the enemies would respond. I always
wondered if other coders were able to make games that they could play
and be challenged. I'm sure whoever wrote Zaxxon was able to sit down
and play his own game for hours. This is what I wanted to achieve.
Jailbreak was my attempt to write a real playable game on the C64 that
would be a challenge to play, even for the programmer who made it. My
intention was to see if some of the smaller software companies might
pick it up. Seeing some of the low quality games that had been released
and sold, I felt that my best effort would certainly be marketable.
The credits indicate a person named Fred designed the graphics. However
I can now say, years later, that he was responsible for the marketable
version only. The version that was released actually used character sets
that I designed and the sprites were taken from various games and
modified. The final version with Fred's improved graphics never did see
the light of day.
The premise of the game was that you were breaking out of a jail set in
the future. The first part of the game had you running down corridors
and shooting guards. You will note that there is graffiti on the wall of
the prison. It reads "RFO." This stood for Rage For Order which was an
American import group that I was a member of at the time. The
second part of the game had you running to your escape ship. Guards and
helicopters would attempt to stop you. This part was seemingly playable
even for me.
The last part took place in space. Your ship was at the bottom of the
screen and an alien ship was at the top of the screen. The ship at the
top was the entire length of the screen and moved left and right. A
revolving barrier went around the ship. You had to shoot out pieces of
the barrier until there was
enough room to get a shot at the ship. Of course this wasn't easy. The
ship would be firing up on you. The most challenging part of this game
was trying to convert your missile sprite position into screen
coordinates to remove the portion of the ship's barrier that you hit.
The top ship was entirely character
based, not sprite based.
The final level was the best part of the game. Sadly, one day I went to
finish that level of the game and the source code was garbled. Every now
and again while coding, I'd load up source code only to find that it had
been corrupted. I believe this was as a result of numerous "save and
replace" operations on
the disk and not validating the disk afterwards. For this reason the
game abruptly ends with a message saying that there is no final level.
If the final level had not been destroyed, the game would have had the
graphics revised and shopped to various software shops. I decided to
release the game as it was, incomplete, to the public. It was uploaded
to all of the major bulletin board systems (BBS's) as you see it.
A group chose to take my game and level pack it. Where the game used to
show a black screen and load the next level (which was already packed)
it now shows an ugly border flashing and the de-pack text on the screen.
I found this to disrupt the game play. There was no need to level pack a
game that was packed already. They claimed to have "cracked, trained and
level packed" the game. The game was not protected, already cracked and
if I'd felt it warranted a trainer I would have included one. By this
time though many groups were hungry for releases and even other
scene-programmers games were not above being
re-released.
Another group, whose name eludes me released a one file version of the
game which I felt was pretty cool. Jailbreak would have been a nice
little game if the last level hadn't corrupted. And as such it remains a
game that wasn't."
Michael J L.
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