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Superior Software Discusses Exile, Repton

Posted by simoniker on from the on-bbc-micro-street dept.

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.

6 of 17 comments (clear)

  1. Repton 3 by tedDancin · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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  2. hmm repton? by scrytch · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

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  3. I first thought of the Exile series by by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

  4. Blimey, does no-one else remember Exile, then? by iainl · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Blimey, does no-one else remember Exile, then? by tc · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

  5. Re:I remember Exile (and Repton...) by ripnet · · Score: 2, Informative

    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!