Games That Weren't 64

Lee Cawley speaks to GTW about work on Obliterator...

"One of the biggest creations I worked on that never saw the light of day was Obliterator.

The game was finished as far as I was aware but it must have got canned. It was finished around the time that Lothlorien was closing down. I had spent a couple of months working from home because there were no wages being paid. At that time very little information was filtering out about what was happening so anything could have happened to it.

I have attached something <Referring to E-mailed shot of Obliterator> that I suspect very few people have ever seen; the loading screen for Obliterator on the C64. I apologise for the quality but the s-vhs lead I made is producing a really poor picture so I have taken these with my digital camera. If I get my lead sorted out, I will send better pics.

This is how close it (Obliterator) actually got to be released. The picture itself carries a bit of a tale… after spending about 12 hours drawing the picture, the disk I had it saved on got corrupted somehow. I had a choice of redrawing the whole thing or doing the extreme. I actually rebuilt the picture sector by sector off the disk by manually tracking the file-links. It almost took me as long as it did to draw the picture so I don’t know which was worse in the end.

Obliterator was coded by a good friend of mine Chris Caress, the programmer of Bosconian on the C64. Chris later became a co-partner in a software house we formed, unfortunately, we lasted a year as the game we wrote ended up unwanted by most of the software houses. It wasn’t a bad game, it just happened to be a shoot-em-up at the same time as IO and Armalyte, stiff competition I’m sure you’ll agree. Chris moved to Barcrest as a fruit machine programmer and is still there now.

It was a mammoth task trying to squeeze Obliterator into the C64 and some compromises had to be made, namely on the enemies. All the screens were there, all the frames of animation for the main character were there but the enemies were changed to fit into the C64 limited resources. As far as the 64 was capable, Obliterator was a faithful conversion. It had some very clever routines that generated screen scroll routines as you played as there was so much information to scroll, character data and colour information for nearly a full screen.

As far as I can remember, the game was going through final tweaks as I was made redundant from Lothlorien. As far as I knew, the game was being released but as time went on, it never happened. I’m not sure if I actually have any of the in-game graphics, I will keep looking. If not, then maybe this is the only evidence remaining along with the music; that Obliterator ever existed on the C64."

Lee Cawley.