Daxis (partially found BBC Micro/Commodore 64 shooter/platformer game; mid 1980s)
The title screen for the BBC Micro version found in one of the demos.
Status: Partially Found
Daxis was a planned vertical scrolling shooter/platformer video game that was going to be released for the BBC Micro & Commodore 64 sometime in the mid 1980's for Audiogenic.[1][2] The game was to be coded by Gary Partis & designed by Darry Styll. The game was not known to have been advertised in any known magazine at the time nor was it ever been publicly shown to any known event. The game remained unknown for years, with it disappearing from existence to be one of the most mysterious cancelled European home computer games, but it would eventually show up online on December 24, 2003 on Stairway To Hell, The BBC Micro and Electron Games Archive.[3]
Development
According to the 2003 post on said website, Peter explained what these demos were & a little bit on how they came to be:
"The three demos I've dug up were all early versions of games, usually cobbled together using core code from old ones with standard sfx, backgrounds and the like. Hence the scruffy source code (which is here too) and bits of BASIC. Although I never was the neatest of coders - if it worked, it was good enuff for me!
These demos are ones I did in my own development time and I don't think ever even went to a software house as they're too unfinished. You may wonder why there are loading screens and slogans and the like - well, call me a fool but I always liked to start the way I meant to go on, with a bit of polish. Getting the pretty DAXIS loader page working was more fun than actually coding anything so I'd spend time doing that, to fight against the oft-occurring nightmare of someone working from home on these kind of things - the call of the pub.
I can't guarantee that my recollections of how/why each game came about are accurate - I'm sure others may remember better than me. Gary (Partis) had - and probably still has - a much better memory than me when it comes to this sort of thing."
On February 4, 2021, ABug10[4] released a YouTube video which was an interview with both Darry Styll & Gary Partis. In the video, more detail was given out on how the game got made & why it was never released. According to Darryl, it was half his game & half Gary's & was thought up when they were drinking at a bar alongside Peter Scott, who also had thought of it being possible to make. Gary meanwhile says that it was meant to include aspects of every successful game at the time, with the platformer & shooter segments just being the meat of the game. Coding started soon after, with all 3 of them doing a part. Gary did the Commodore 64 version while Peter did the BBC Micro version. They reportedly also told Dave Reader that they were making the game. However, Darryl left Audiogenic later on while Gary said that he only did the high score table on the C64 version.
Aftermath
According to Gary in the 2021 interview, Peter Scott had sent 3 of his disks of the BBC Micro version to Dave Moore, one of the people behind The BBC Micro and Electron Games Archive, with the aforementioned context from him alongside it. The 3 demos altogether showcase 2 title screens, a vertical scrolling shooter segment & 2 platformer segments. Gary has said that he has hundreds of floppies that he should recover in order to preserve more of his work, but so far none of his version of the game has shown up. It's currently unknown if Darryl has any stuff regarding Daxis archived, seeing as he was just the designer of the game & had left Audiogenic seemingly without doing much on the game.