REBELLION, AND THE ARCADE KIT UNDER IT

Hazelwood is a slow, careful adventure. Screens slide one at a time, places load from disk, and you type what you want to say.

Rebellion is the opposite: Defender's play with the look of a galactic rebellion. A fighter skimming over a desert planet, a scanner showing the whole world, a screen full of things to shoot, and no loading once it starts.

The arcade kit

Before the game, we built the parts every fast 64 game needs and put them in a kit of their own:

• A raster interrupt chain, so the screen, the sound and the input all run on time, every frame.
• Input for joystick and keys.
• A scroller for the landscape.
• A sprite multiplexer, so more movers share the screen than the 64's eight sprites.
• Sound, random numbers, scores and a high score table.

The kit is meant to be shared. Rebellion is the first game on it, and several of the ideas on our whiteboard will stand on it too.

Where it is

Early days. The Starhawk flies over the desert with its score, ships and bursts on the screen, on NTSC first (most of us here run NTSC 64s) and PAL too. The scanner is next, then the things that shoot back.

Hazelwood comes first, so Rebellion waits its turn. But the kit is done, and it's solid.