Escape from Colditz  (Preview)
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
_________________________

Escape From Colditz
1991 Digital Magic

Status: Preview, Findability: 4/5
Coding: Miles Barry, Ste Pattullo
Graphics: Jon Law
Sound: Miles Barry, Richard Rinn, Marc Francois, Sean Connolly

A very much awaited game which many a C64 person can remember. 1991 saw the introduction of a new C64 game based on the famous German POW prison, “Colditz”.

The game was based on an an isometric 3D map, in the same vein as Ocean’s “Great Escape”, but with full colour and no monocrome graphics. Not only that, but many new ideas and features to create a much better game of the style. The sheer scale of the game was immense, and technically very impressive due to its creative team onboard.

Miles Barry, a talented programmer, who didn’t have much luck with getting his work released, was the guy behind this very game. As was Jon Law, who worked on the classic First Samurai, doing the fantastic graphic work. Music was well crafted by Richard Rinn, or Deek as he’s known by us all. Code was also worked on by Steven Pattullo, at the start, who people may remember as the creator of the Limbo games for CDU back in the late 80′s.

There was disagreements though, and Ste left Digital Magic and moved on. Miles picked up the game, but started fresh with a new engine, but using the same graphics from Jon Law (Who apparently got drunk one night and changed all the sprites to women to make a Prisoner Cell Block H clone for fun – according to Ste Pattulo)… Anyway!….

The graphics were ported from the Amiga, and were compressed into 6k for the chars, and 4k for each of the 120 rooms.

People actually thought the game had been finished, and Commodore Format got a few hearts racing when promoting its review in Issue 12, only to have nothing actually inside the magazine.

The game never appeared, and screenshots were all that remained, and some juicy details of what was going to be.

“What happened?”, I hear you ask… well Digital Magic, the creators of this fine game, unfortunatly ran up debts of up to £100,000 and thus the company went under. Unfortunately so did the game, which was not completed at the time. No other company bought the rights to the licence from Gibson games, and so the game was finally laid to rest.

What did happen, was that a preview actually got sneaked out, which included a full introduction and pretty much most of what the game ever was.

This preview is available to download from here, but be warned, it is very bugged and you may find that your character gets stuck a lot of the time. However, with some recent perseverance, I discovered there was much more to this preview than I originally thought, and found that almost the entire game map is complete in this preview, which is huge. The guards are inactive, there is some interaction, and of course there are plenty of bugs. If you can’t reach the later parts, the screenshots show much of what to expect.

GTW has attempted to find Miles Barry to talk more about this game, and to discover whether there exists a more advanced preview of this game. Good sources reveil that hope in finding anything more is remote, due to most of Miles’ work being on PDS, which would have been wiped years ago.

Recently in 2012, Sean Connolly suggested that his Quota loader music was originally intended as the loader tune for Escape from Colditz.   Marc Francois also did a tune which was unused like Sean’s.  We are not sure which tune this is.  We have added Sean’s Quota loader tune as part of this entry for now.

A lovely preview (Albeit, bugged), unfortunate casulty of debt…

Contributions: Jason Kelk, Andrew Fisher, http://www.Zzap64.co.uk, Ste Pattullo

---

Ste Pattullo speaks to GTW about work on Escape From Colditz...

"Just found your website, I did indeed program Escape from Colditz on the 64 after working freelance for a number of magazines. I did do a lot of work for popular computign weekly and commodore computing international. I spent a long time on Colditz using just laser genius and no development system (what a drag!!!) I am now 35, married and live in Rhuddlan in North Wales . There is not much call for commodre 64 programmers anymore so I now work as a hypnotist. Yes I have to admit I did write the Limbo games and did anyone actually type in my first game from PCW, it was UFO and it was dire!!!

I left DMS in 1991 when i thought the company was in trouble. I went to work for ICI and left poor old MIles Barry to Colditz. I think I may have a copy somewhere.

I may still have a copy of colditz somewhere at my mums house, I will do my best to dig it out for you. I think in the version I have all of the guards have changed to women as the graphic artist came in drunk one night and changed it into Prisoner cell block H!!

My list of games as far as I can remeber is:- Ufo Sphere Ufo2 Limbo Limbo2 Most of my magazine articles were on 6502 programming, and I had loads of stuff published in the 80's and 90's. I also programmed a load of routines for people to use in their games such as sprite movers and scrollers.

Before colditz I worked on the arcade game Vinicators for Tengen but I was working on someone elses code who left. I told Tengen that I wanted to re-writre it from scratch but they said no. I told them I was not prepared to carry on with the project. They then offered me Dragon Spirit but I turned them down.

Digital Magic was a great company to work for. At the time we were all very young and from early days it was not hard to see that the company was in trouble (late wages, cheques bouncing ect.) However I really enjoyed my time there and it was not un-common to go to work at 2 in the morning after staggering out of a night club!!

Platformania never got finished, it was a manic miner style game but with 2 players playing at once. It was very tacky but I am sure I still have that somewhere. The games I wrote for the magazines were very basic as i concentrated more on the programming articles. The games were written quickly and I was paid quite well for them.

My first published game UFO in 1986 netted me about £250, not bad for a 16 year old back then as all my mates were on about 20 odd quid a week on a YTS scheme! When I wrote Limbo2 the magazine asked me to write a diary of the game. I have still got that it you want me to send you it then lets me know and I will post it to you.

At the moment I am not on the internet at home so if I do not get back to you straight away then don't worry I will do in due course. Anyway nice to hear from you, it has dragged up a few memories, anything else you want to know the please get in touch.


http://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/escape-from-colditz/
