VideogameJunkie Exile Feature

Exile was released in 1988 for the BBC Micro series of computers by Superior Software. Gamers purchasing the game immediately knew they were in for something special - Superior knew it too and they'd packaged the game in an expensive box and, like Elite, had shipped it with a novella. In fact comparisons with Elite and its epic scale were often made and were not discouraged by Superior, and who can blame them!

In the game you play the role of Mike Finn, a member of the Columbus Force (a group of intergalactic space police and all round good eggs), who, while returning from an earlier mission, is ordered to divert his spacecraft to the planet Phoebus to rescue the crew members of a previous mission to the planet who have been captured, maybe killed, by a mad scientist named Triax who was exiled there long ago. As the game starts you find yourself unarmed in your ship in orbit around the planet and within seconds Triax appears and steals a device named the Destinator from your ship thus leaving you stranded.

The loading screen I remember being bowled away immediately. The sprites were large, detailed and colourful and the scrolling smooth. And once you were out of your ship and flying around with your jet pack it became immediately clear that gravity acted on you and that you had inertia. Which for the time was astounding. Blowing across the surface of Phoebus were strong particle winds and if you flew to the left or right of your ship you encountered them as they applied resistance to your movements and sent you tumbling around. As the game progressed you entered caverns and met numerous types of animals and other adversaries. All of which behaved convincingly, and on which acted all the same physical rules as applied to you.

View video (divx) Once you tore yourself away from wow-ing at the technical achievements it quickly became apparent that the game was both huge and hard. Rock hard in fact. And you know how they say how space is big, really big, well its not quite that big but trust me its meganormous. And after a short break t was at this point you started wow-ing again. This map (available in a smaller size here) gives an indication of just how big the game is. When you've scraped your jaw off the floor after that prepare to unhinge it again: thats one single continously scrolling level. On a Beeb! I'm sorry - but that still astounds me today. For those interested in the technical details the corridors and rooms in the map were generated algorithmically with key structures overlayed. Though even with that the game required large amounts of the BBCs RAM and unless you had sideways RAM fitted to your machine you ended up playing in a tiny letterbox as screen real estate was used as additional storage space.

Breaking with convention again, in Exile you could never die. Instead your suit remembered upto four locations and as you approached the point of death you'd return to the last position remembered. Some of the (oh so many) cunning puzzles in Exile were built around this. Many of the puzzles were also built around the games representation of real world logic - water to put out fires, using one kind of animal to bait another. For further examples of the games cunning or if, like most of us, your stuck here's a solution from The Micro User to read.

Being a 1998 release Exile appeared very late in the life of the BBC so its perhaps not surprising that not many people played it at the time of its release. Later versions were released on the Amiga and ST with improved graphics but again they weren't that widely played. However thanks to the web a reasonable online following has grown up around the game and in recent years the game has recieved coverage in the gaming press having featured in both a 'Retro Review' and a 'Making Of' article in Edge magazine.