The story of Exile, one of the greatest sci-fi games of the 1980s

Hello! Welcome back to the last entry in Captain's Log, a mini-series on the things we love about space - and how video games so brilliantly engage with it. You can read all of our pieces in the series in one place as they go live, here at theI didn't know what a Metroidvania game was when I played Exile in the eighties - probably because the term didn't exist yet. I also didn't appreciate how pioneering this BBC Micro game was.

Irvin and Smith were old school friends from St Albans. Says Irvin:"There was a group of us who were excited by the home computers that were starting to appear. Ian Bell [co-author of the legendary space trading game, Elite] was a friend, too." Their school purchased a handful of Tandy TRS80 computers, and by the time Irvin and his friends were in Sixth Form, the BBC Micro had arrived."In my gap year, I developed a game called Starship Command - while Jeremy did Pirates In Space.

The scale of Exile is impressive, but there's so much more to the Superior game. The game's physics engine, with object collision, friction, mass variation, wind and explosive forces all influencing movement, was innovative. Testing was paramount, as Irvin describes."It was all carefully tweaked over time so that the various puzzles worked without loopholes. The object and terrain collision tests had to be finely tuned so they were fast and felt right.

Recognising the original and groundbreaking game it had on its hands, Superior released Exile in a video cassette-sized box, incorporating the novella, instruction manual, keyboard guide and game disk. A dramatic cover, created by Superior regular Les Ives, completed the package. To everyone's relief, the reviews were uniformly good."Exile is certainly a contender for the best Beeb arcade adventure for a long time - it's definitely the best game this year.

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