Format: Spectrum
Release: N/A
Publisher: Imagine
Developer: In-house

When Psygnosis released Brataccas for the Atari ST in 1985, the beginning of an era for the Liverpudlian firm was a footnote to the story of infamous 8bit publisher Imagine. Brataccas, you see, was the game that was formed from the husk of code left over from Imagine’s so-called Mega Game, Bandersnatch: the UK industry’s most famous game that never saw the light of day.
   
There were to be two Mega Games; Bandersnatch for the Spectrum and Psyclapse for the C64. Both were the brainchild of David Lawson, a coder turned director at Imagine. Declaring, with customary ambition and enthusiasm, that his programmers had reached the limit of the Spectrum’s and C64’s abilities, he proposed a novel solution: hardware add-ons, sold hardware add-ons, sold with and facilitating games with unprecedented visual flair and state-of-the-art design.
   
Conceived at the end of 1983, Imagine began work on its Spectrum-based Mega Game in early ’84. Its development team of four was astonishingly large for the time – John Gibson (now at Warthog) and Ian Wetherburn (sadly deceased) coding, with Steve Cain (Tin Tiger) and Ally Noble (Rage) fulfilling principle art duties. Bandersnatch was designed as a flick-screen adventure set in an intergalactic nightclub on an asteroid, its buildings linked by glass tubes. Eschewing combat, its gameplay was to involve interacting with various autonomous AI-controlled characters via speech bubbles.
   
“It was supposed to be a game where you wandered around a free environment and interacted with people, which was unheard of at the time,” recalls Steve Cain. “Balloons would pop up with speech in as you did so, and you worked out clues from what they said and the questions you asked them. I can’t remember actually what it was about now – I think it was some kind of tale of revenge and murder.”
   
For perspective, it’s worth pointing out that Ultimate – one of the most technically accomplished Spectrum developers in 1984, the year of Knight Lore – was working on maze game Sabre Wulf at this point. “I was working on the engine, Ian Weatherburn was working on the speech bubbles,” explains John Gibson. “That was actually quite a complicated idea for the time. It wasn’t just going to be set strings just stored away somewhere. There was going to be some sort of system that made up answers to questions. The idea was to make a game that was different every time you played it.”
   


Such features could certainly have been achieved on a basic Spectrum, but it was the much-vaunted aesthetics of Bandersnatch that necessitated the use of a hardware add-on. Despite laughable claims in the press that this device increased the power of Sinclair’s machine by ten or 20 times, it was actually, Gibson says, a fairly simple ROM device of either 128k or 256k on which code could be stored. For the artists, this was plausibly more room for graphics than they had been afforded in Imagine’s previous releases combined. “Oh yeah. The more, the better!” laughs Ally Noble. “I can remember doing the animation for it. I must admit, having had all these wonderful ideas about what it might be like, though, the reality of it was that we still only had about 16 frames to do the walk and the run of the main character. That wasn’t that much different than what we’d had before – perhaps around eight frames.”
   
The problem, however, was that the plans of David Lawson and his Mega Game team were too ambitious, even with extra memory. “Most of my work was messing around, trying to make it all fit,” Gibson chuckles. “That was the trouble. It soon became clear that the extra 128k, 256k, or whatever it was, it just wasn’t going to be enough. We’d spent months and months working on it, and it became apparent that the form it stood in just wasn’t going to fit in. All the graphics would have had to be redone. Dave Lawson always thought big – he’d wanted big, big, big from day one, and there just wasn’t space.”
   
Cain remembers this situation keenly. “The problem was that we didn’t have the graphics finished. We had all the backgrounds in, all the maps working, rooms for three or four sprites, and no RAM left whatsoever [laughs]. We were talking about putting extra sprites on the tape as well. Some of it was going to be ROM, some of it was going to be RAM.”
   
Looking back at old Spectrum magazines of the time, it seems there was an inverse proportionate relationship between Imagine’s health and its claims for Bandersnatch. Director Bruce Everess was quoted as claiming that “Bandersnatch will make every other game obsolete overnight.” Its cereal box-sided packaging would contain, ‘Your Spectrum’ related in its August ’84 issue, a music tape, posters, tokens, toys and, of course, the requisite peripheral. The price also increased from the level originally mooted: once £20–£30, later reports fixed it at £40. In actual fact, the final price under discussion at Imagine was even higher. “It looked like it was going to cost in the region of £64 or something,” Gibson confides. “They’d have had to sell it for £64 just to break even. Who was going to pay that for a Spectrum game?”
   
It soon became apparent to the Spectrum team that the troubled production of Bandersnatch was the least of their worries. “We were the Mega Game team, and we were kept separate from everyone else,” says Noble, “but I can remember a really bad meeting where we were asked to leave the room, and everyone else was being given their marching orders.”