Superior Software Discusses Exile, Repton

Thanks to TotalGames.net for its feature exploring the history of '80s-era UK game developer Superior Software, noting that the Europe-centric "BBC Micro and Acorn Electron were often overlooked by many of the larger software publishers", but Superior, "responsible for hits such as Citadel, Exile and, of course, Repton", is still worth remembering. An interview with Richard Hansom of the still-in-existence Superior Interactive discusses new versions of the Boulderdash-like (although devised independently) Repton, and also notes that an update of the seminal Exile is a "possibility for the future". We've previously mentioned chess players' Repton addiction on Slashdot Games.

Comments

Repton 3

[tedDancin]

No remake could ever beat Repton 3. Check out BeebGames for more games, including a large collection of Superior Software games (scroll down on the left-hand nav), as well as AcronSoft and a whole heap of smaller companies games that didn't take off. Oh, and don't forget the emulators. (:

*sigh*.. they don't make 'em like they used to.

Exile?!

[Mukaikubo]

Oh. Not the REAL Exile, the only Exile I recognize; Escape from the Pit! bloody Slithzerikai...

PREPARE TO DIE FOR REPTON

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a Repton game for the C-64 too but it was more of a space-shooter type of game. I remember when it was loading it said "PREPARE TO DIE FOR REPTON".

hmm repton?

[scrytch]

Am I the only one who remembers the name "Repton" as connected to a kind-of-slow but still fairly fun knockoff of Defender/Stargate for the C64? Instead of kidnapping citizens, the bad guys you were fighting were building some kind of super-weapon, and you had to prevent them from completing it. I guess it's bound to happen that names that sound cool will collide. I for one have never even heard of the other repton.

Re:hmm repton?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who remembers the name "Repton" as connected to a kind-of-slow but still fairly fun knockoff of Defender/Stargate for the C64?

It was out for the apple 2 as well. I remember this. And Conan, and Karatika, and taxman (pac man rip off) and suicide, and 100 other cheezy apple 2 games from my childhood.

Re:hmm repton?

[smileyy]

No, you're not the only one. Was also available for the Apple ][.

I first thought of the Exile series by

[Anonymous Coward]

Spiderweb Software, they have over four Exile games
(mac, windows and linux no less)
http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/products.h tml

Blimey, does no-one else remember Exile, then?

[iainl]

As far as I'm concerned, it was Better Than Elite. Brilliant, brilliant game, though viciously difficult in places, and prone to leaving you stuck in ways that required starting again from scratch.

It did the whole 'sandbox' thing wonderfully well, too, thanks to its amazing physics.

Re:Blimey, does no-one else remember Exile, then?

[Haeleth]

Ahh, Exile... I have very fond memories of struggling to remember all the keys, then being killed repeatedly by the first robot (if I made it past the hamburger^Wgun turret, which was a moot issue). The only part I ever really managed to enjoy was using the targetting indicator thingy to make it look as though the player was relieving himself. (Hey, it was funny to a eight-year old.)

Exile was basically too damned difficult for its own good. It was pushing the Beeb to the very limits of its capabilities, and it showed. For that reason I wouldn't describe it as as good as Elite or Repton, which managed to have amazing gameplay without being too complex to control.

Re:Blimey, does no-one else remember Exile, then?

[tc]

Yeah, Exile was a great game, but it was bloody difficult.

I must admit that despite working on the A1200 and C32 ports (I'm Tony Cox), I never actually played through the whole original game myself. Without walkthroughs from Peter (and William Reeve) I'd never have seen the whole game except during debugging.

It was ahead of its time, though. Despite all the clever little tricks in the code (of which there were many), Peter's overall architecture was clean and one that wouldn't look too amiss in a modern title. I probably learned more about game development from walking through Peter's code than I did from any other single experience.

Re:Blimey, does no-one else remember Exile, then?

[iainl]

Wow, Tony Cox, well I never. Great porting job you did; its the version that I still play occasionally, rather than the BBC one. Didn't you work on Syndicate Wars, as well?

Re:Blimey, does no-one else remember Exile, then?

[tc]

Most of the 'heavy lifting' in the porting to Amiga was already done by William Reeve, so he deserves the bulk of the credit. I mostly just did some graphical sprucing up for the A1200 chipset, bugfixing, and things like figuring out how to get the game saves to work on the CD32.

I didn't work on the core of Syndicate Wars, although some of the library code I worked on at Bullfrog I think found its way in there. I mostly worked on Dungeon Keeper, a bunch of library code, and a couple of cancelled projects.

I remember Exile (and Repton...)

[ripnet]

Exile had a bitch of a copy protection system... that was my first experience of running code in a debugger, and using breakpoints!.

The debugger was a rom which SIMULATED the 6502 processor in software, because AFAIK the 6502 had no support for debugging and breakpoints

Superb game though, would love a console version in 3d

Re:I remember Exile (and Repton...)

[ripnet]

Forgot to say, the protection used self modification techniques to unencrypt the next part of the code, and IIRC the unencryption routine over-shot what you would expect by 3 bytes, and modified the JMP instruction to the start of the next bit of code, to point to somewhere with real code. Before it was a valid JMP instruction to a piece of dummy code. A lot like the XBox!

Re:I remember Exile (and Repton...)

[grahamwest]

I used Exmon on the Beeb and that didn't simulate the 6502 - that would've been much, much too slow. It just swapped the memory at the breakpoint location with an SWI or a JMP (I forget exactly) and put the memory back after the breakpoint was hit.

I didn't find the Exile/Repton Infinity protection very hard to break - took me a week of evenings if I remember rightly. The disc looked like it was only 1 track long normally but there was another catalog sector hidden and encrypted for the loader to use.

The much harder protection to break, in my opinion, was Kevin Edward's 6522 timer based stuff. The code did operations using the 1MHz timer, the encrypted payload and the decryptor machine code for inputs. If you changed the decryptor you'd throw the timer reads off and to correctly simulate the behaviour you needed to know exactly which cycle of a 5-cycle LDA would fetch the low byte of the VIA timer. Nasty!

I'd love to get licenses from Superior for a bunch of their old games and do a compilation on GBA (or better yet PS2/GCN/Xbox), but I think my bosses have more pressing plans for my time...

Ravenskull

[Lord of the Wazz]

I think my favourite Superior game was probably Ravenskull. It took an absolute age for me to complete, and that was using the maps and solution that I found in a games magazine. I can still remember it's catchy repetitive theme tune now...