Games That Weren't 64

Shaun Pearson speaks from his webpage about work on Orbital Run...

"Orbital Run [working title]: Back in 1991 there was a lack of good car games for the c64 and i/we had the idea of taking best elements of Outrun and adapting them for the c64 to make a really good game. The idea was for a high speed game that did not require multi loads (which sort of killed many games) and rather than being limited to conversion issues would have been geared around what the c64 was capable of.

The road effect was coded and featured straights and 2 types of curve, one type of curve could be driven at full speed while the other sharper type of curve could only be taken in low gear (just like Outrun) and the road used 2 shades of grey with a stripe effect (just like Outrun). Each car used 2 sprites, so we could have up to 4 cars overlapping on screen at any one time (including the main player controlled car). What we didn't want to do was use all the sprites on the main player controlled car and use characters for the rest of the cars (as that nearly always looks a bit naff on other games). 2 different cars were drawn complete with all their scaling frames.

We had a black Porsche 928 (Chase HQ style) and a white Lamborghini Countach (player controlled). The backdrop was to be a star field that could scroll left and right complete with parallax effect. The idea was for the player to make his/her way across the universe on the road system located in space. So it would have been possible for the player of fall of the track (a little like the rainbow track in Mario Kart/Snes).

So, if you can imagine racing at 200mph though space in a racing against time (without a multi load) then maybe you can imagine the concept of Orbital Run :)"

Shaun Pearson.