The Tail of Beta Lyrae
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| The Tail of Beta Lyrae | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Philip Price, music by Gary Gilbertson. |
| Publisher(s) | Datamost |
| Designer(s) | Philip Price |
| Engine | Graphics Engine by Philip Price, Music Engine AMP (Advanced Music Processor) by Philip Price |
| Platform(s) | Atari |
| Release date | 1983 |
| Genre(s) | Action Game |
| Mode(s) | Scrolling shooter |
| Rating(s) | N/A |
| Media | 5ΒΌ" disk |
| Input methods | Keyboard |
The Tail of Beta Lyrae is a 1983 computer game for the Atari family of computers, created by Philip Price with music by Gary Gilbertson, and published by Datamost.
[edit] Premise
The Tail of Beta Lyrae is a side-scrolling combat game that puts you in the role of "a Wing Commander assigned to the Beta Quadrant." Alien forces have occupied the mining colonies in the asteroid fields of the Beta Lyrae binary star system, and it's up to you to pilot your fighter through the fields, destroying the alien invaders and their installations.
Creator Philip Price states that the "tail" in the game's name "came from a play on telling a tale and the setting of a binary star system which only had fragments of rock orbiting it because of the tidal forces brought on by the two suns; these fragments are the tail of the system's creation." [1]
[edit] Gameplay
Though not strictly a clone, The Tail of Beta Lyrae closely parallels the concept and feel of 1981's popular Scramble arcade game and its successors. As the landscape scrolls past, the player uses a joystick to move the ship around the screen, avoiding attacks from laser and missile emplacements and destroying buildings, power generators, vessels and alien miners. The landscape and configuration of objects is generated pseudo-randomly(within both design and game play difficulty constraints), adding a degree of unpredictability to the game. Game design also added new objects to levels already played after the user had owned the game for a time in order to add new excitement to experienced areas.
For most of the development, Philip Price lived in a shack, sleeping on a moldy bed, with no running water, using a jeep battery to power an Atari 400 (32 kilobyte, 1.8 mhz 8 bit computer) which had a flat keyboard and a very unreliable cassette deck used for storing code(assembly) and saving the executable.
