'EPT'

Elite Piss-Take - A Space Opera

A long lost game from Rainbird Software sort of resurfaces many years later..

As a long-time fan of 'Elite' and many of its derivatives, I remember reading with some excitement about a new and super-sized concept, taking the Elite idea and thoroughly updating it for the new 16-bit era back in 1987. This was going to be 'EPT', a working title as you might have already guessed, and this game was supposed to be something really special. I duly attended various computer shows, with this game often mentioned as a forthcoming attraction, but nothing was ever seen of it.

After a while it became clear that nothing from here was going to see the light of day, the whole game concept being too burdensomely complex to go forward successfully, and it was quietly dropped. Never mind, I had plenty of goodies to be going on with, Carrier Command was a pretty fair trade for example, and EPT faded away.

Well after an insane number of years, thanks to this magical invention called the internets, various memories of Rainbow, Firebird, and the whole of what was called 'Telecomsoft' appeared on a spanking new website called http://birdsanctuary.co.uk

Apart from their active catalogue, there was quite a bit of material about lost projects, including a few "never really there" ones like 'Broadsword', an isometric role-player, or how about 'Lasers and Labyrinths', described as a sci- fi based Dungeonmaster clone. This did not entirely die, as the graphics were re-used a year later in Xenomorph.

But it is EPT that we are here for today, and this was the most complete and best-documented 'lost' project. There are several pages of design notes, a few prototype manual pages which may well have appeared in a finished product, and even a partially playable *.ST disk image.

EPT was born from an early polygon rendering 3D engine made by Andy Beveridge on the ST, there was assistance from Adrian Stephens, and the whole 'Space opera' complexity of the game was given a kick by Ricardo Pinto, who was the person who subsequently retrieved and made the archive material publicly downloadable.

From the potted history on the website, EPT suffered alternatively from too little and then too much game design. Initially, there was just a collection of 3D demos with very little actual game tagged on, just some rudimentary coder graphics for the cockpit, and a hope that somewhere out of the chaos, a viable game would emerge. Subsequently a new design document moved matters completely in the other direction with a game design that contained far too many elements for any sort of realistic release date.

The design notes for the 4th April 1987 reveal that apart from the basic 'Elite' style premise, there would be different space ship types available to the play er, with the ultimate aim of being able to access the inside of a ship. Liners would only let you have a limited number of options for example as a fare-paying passenger, but control of a full-sized dreadnought would give you options for controlling other ships in a fleet and even troops to assault a space station! Whilst inside a space station, you could move around within it and access various areas for the buying and selling of cargoes, and for those Han Solo Cantina style punch-ups with laser blaster moments.

From the planning document, the authors were intending to include the following.

"Thus there are moon cities heavily based on Earth cities with bars frequented by pirates and residential areas where the player can buy an apartment when he can hide things. There are hotels with beautiful views of the planet they orbit and spacecraft showrooms where the prospective customer can take various craft out for a trial spin. There is a city that is a pirate stronghold and a moon where a secret organisation is building a super-dreadnought called Darkseed..."

Wait, there's even more!

"The player can user-define their own character, partially based on their own attributes, but with other characteristics adapted for their role in the game and constructs a mug-shot from that information. The resulting ID file contains all the players details, bank accounts etc, and even allows remote ship control. A complex set of algorithms handles the character aspect, any special skills, and how successful the player might be at a given task, based on these attributes."

I also found what was described as the "Babelpisc Translation unit", a description of a communication console to enable use of a symbolic language to communicate with other game characters, which reminds me of the game 'Captain Blood'. This has fairly basic options from 'flatter', to 'threaten' or 'bribe', or even if all else fails, 'grovel' and 'surrender'.

There was a clearly defined start-up process for what would have been the final game, the 'Commander Jameson' scenario in other words. The player starts off on the insignificant moonbase Kikor, but is left a small collection of artefacts by his dead father. The player has two chances of avoiding boredom, either stow away on a vegetable freighter, or buy a passage on the Titanac to Kutta, the melting pot of the inner planets. He has several options when he gets there, from joining the local pirates, stealing a ship, or volunteering for the navy among other things.

There was a detailed description of dozens of different locations, a cold-war situation between two rival powers, and a couple of extra game characters of significance to the overall plot arc. You could say that this game would have had a closer resemblance to Frontier, the Elite sequel, which did not come along until a lot later, and after a protracted development process of its own. It was also an awful lot to fit in, even on a 16-bit machine as it turned out.

Slow progress from the original 3D demos, a move of developer location (to Realtime, the Carrier Command people), and a general slow loss of interest doomed this game. When Microprose took over Rainbird, the project was finally dropped in 1989, although nothing much had been done with it since 1988. There were even grumblings from David Braben about apparent similarities to the Elite game design, but no legal action followed, so that wasn't an issue in the end.

EPT, the disk-image..

There was some tangible coding done towards the EPT project, and this is contained within a disk image in .ST format. It can run on any real or emulated ST, regardless of TOS version, I checked it out in an emulated (Hatari) environment with both TOS 2.06 and 1.6, both TOS versions which appeared after the EPT project was canned. When fiddling with the system options, I found that it did not like Falcon TOS, or any cpu other than an 8 MHz 68000. It needed 1 MB of memory, but the final finished version should have been ok with a 512 KB ST.

What the disk allows the player to do is quite well described below.

"Later development versions (based on the new design document) allowed the player to fly off to a new destination within the solar system, shoot at a variety of demo spaceships, dock with Skywheels (aka spacestations), fiddle with the interface that allowed purchases and bank loans, and switch between spaceship cockpit designs (the default cockpit was for a Mangoran Starhawk). "

So now it's my turn...

Autobooting the disk image throws you straight into the middle of deep space, surrounded by various hostiles, no quiet pausing at the space station docking bay for Commander Jameson whilst he ponders his first move here! The main graphic is a cockpit front view and scanner which works in a disturbingly similar fashion to the scanner in Elite, various icons at the side await clicking on, the game demo is entirely mouse controlled. Somehow I find the key (spacebar) to fire the lasers, but that only helps if the enemy present themselves in front of you, I can't quite get to grips with making the thing move. Hitting F1 to F6 reveals other cockpit graphics, presumably for other ship types that the player might well use later, these seem to be more incomplete than the first one. At this point I decided to stop and regroup for a quick read of the quick start guide, specially written for this disk image.

Firstly I research the mystery of how to control the ship. This is mouse based, and you click the left hand button and hold it down to enable a thruster control whilst the cursor is pointing in a specific place. The same procedure is used to direct the ship, whilst the mouse pointer is positioned and dragged over the scanner window according to where you want to go. Quite elegant and simple really, it generally works well, apart from one or two moments where the mouse cursor strayed from where it should be. The 3D updating is sufficiently quick to enable it to work well, although there is a little bit of inertia (deliberately placed?)

Combat can take place using this system, as you can fire the lasers with the space bar whilst frantically adjusting the pitch and yaw of your craft to point it at the bad guys. To use the missiles requires a separate mouse click on one of the control icons, and means you have to break away from controlling the ship. The enemies are generally easy to beat, whether things would have been toughened up for the final game is conjectural.

A further read of the quick start guide takes me through the process of using the navigation computer and auto-pilot for long range travel. Arrival at the planet and the subsequent space station docking are both elements recognisable to fans of Elite. Mercifully, you are not expected to manually dock, a docking computer does it all for you. Then you can have a play with some of the interactive parts of the space station (or Skywheel as it is known in the game.)

You can enter a bank or shop and attempt to communicate, but the characters aren't able to interact back at this point and the graphics are a temporary work in progress. We are also told it is not possible to get out from there again, so you will have to reboot the disk image. The quick start guide suggests clicking around to see what else you can find, but it is clear that is the extent of what had been done before it stopped. We're Doomed!

From what I saw here, it is clear that EPT was doomed by the vast scale and complexity of the proposed project. The 3D was perfectly fine and smooth and would have made a perfectly good straight arcade or mission orientated game along the lines of Starglider 2, but that latter game was already in development and may well have been one of the reasons why EPT got dropped.

Things didn't end unhappily for the participants in this project though. Andy Beveridge, Adrian Stephens and Martin Day subsequently formed The Assembly Line, who produced Cybercon III for US Gold (drafting in Ricardo Pinto again to help knock the game design into shape) and the Cyberpunk inspired Interphase (for Image Works) as well as working with the Bitmap Brothers on Xenon II (again for Image Works).

CiH, for Alive Mag, July '08 - Rebooted for Mag 2012..

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