The Bird Sanctuary

EPT - Memories

Continued...

The months of slow progress eventually took its toll on Adrian Stephens, who had long since lost the creative interest to continue working on the game. Sensing this problem, Ricardo gave Adrian an escape route by negotiating to move the project (with Andy Beveridge in tow) to Realtime Games in Leeds, who were still busy working on versions of Carrier Command. The basic idea behind this move was to give Andy a creative and structured environment with like-minded programmers in which to work, and to get Realtime to help implement some of the 3D models designed by Ricardo.

With hindsight, the move to Leeds was probably the beginning of the end for EPT. Unfortunately, Realtime (and Graeme Baird in particular) were swamped with their own work-load and were unable to contribute much time to EPT. The lack of real progress in the previous two years was stacking up the odds against EPT being completed. However, once a new game design had been drawn up by Ricardo, the contract was extended but with a diminishing royalty rate based upon newly agreed delivery dates. It was therefore in the developer's best interests to get the game finished and published on time. Unfortunately, the new and richly detailed game specification was a bit too big, and this just made getting the game finished even more of a challenge than before.

A number of additional external factors were also probably responsible for the game's ultimate demise. Telecomsoft had a number of other 3D space games in development, including Argonaut's Starglider 2 and Mr Micro's conversions of Elite for the ST and Amiga. Slightly further off in the future was Maelstrom's Starlord game, which shared a number of similarities with EPTs new game design. Lastly, there were grumblings from David Braben (via his agent, Jacqui Lyons) relating to the alleged similarity in some of EPT's design to the original Elite game and the (then) unreleased, undeveloped and deeply mysterious sequel. Ricardo fended off the accusations, but they certainly didn't help!

Although little was achieved after the Summer of '88, EPT wasn't officially cancelled until June '89, after the sale to MicroProse had gone through. MicroProse showed no interest in signing EPT, so it was down to Angela Sutherland (who had been Development Manager at Telecomsoft) to cancel the game on behalf of BT.

In the mean time, Andy Beveridge, Adrian Stephens and Martin Day 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: Megablast (again for Image Works).

Thanks to Ricardo Pinto, Ian Oliver and Adrian Stephens for recalling some of the above details and a huge thanks to Ricardo for the loan of his EPT development and documentation disks!

< 1 2

The naming game

For the computer press, the Telecomsoft marketing department often called the game STAR (which was an acronym for Space Time And Relativity) to avoid having to explain why it was being called EPT by everyone else!

In the summer of '88, the Telecomsoft Development department came up with Frontier as an alternative title, and this was used in some of the computer magazines for a while afterwards. Interesting then that the eventual sequel to Elite (published in 1993) was also called Frontier! Great minds think a-like, eh?

Titles for EPT suggested by the developers included Empire of the Planets, Battle for the Middle Rift, Star Dreadnoughts, The second Ihranian war, Planet Supremacy, Planet Conquest, The War of the Planets, Warlord of the Planets, The Warlords of System Sol, The Battle for System Sol, Star Fortress, Planet Wars, Battleplanet, Lords of the Inner Worlds, Imperial Planet, To Conquer Planets!, Starblood, Starfire, Between Worlds, Quasar, Pulsar, Krilix, The Trouble with Krilix, and The Skywheels of Sol.