Terrahawks: The Second Assault Introduction

Terrahawks: The Second Assault Cover

Early in 2011, Robbert Jansen, administrator of the famous Videopac and Odyssey2 forum, was contacted by a developer of games for Videopac in the days of 1982/1983. The programmer told Robbert that he liked his website and offered him his material from his programming days at Philips. He was going to get rid of them but he wanted his materials to get a good home.

After a while of emailing back and forth Robbert decided that it would be definitely worth a trip to London, where the programmer lived. The day in London proved to be a happy one. They both sat down and opened a box filled with EPROMs, Robbert was in prototype heaven.

There were many known games like  Morse, RobotCity, Turtles, Killer Bees, Q*bert, Terrahawks, Black Hole (Neutron Star), (Play) Tag, SuperCobra, Spider-Man, Popeye and Frogger, but there was more.  During testing Robbert discovered 5 unknown titles: A sound tool and the four games Himalaya, Bastion, Cat Burglar and … Terrahawks!

Terrahawks? Not the Terrahawks that we know, but a completely different game! A sequel? We are not sure. A sequel to Videopac 51 Terrahawks was announced in a French catalog. An other possibility would be that Philips got the Terrahawks license and started developing a game. The one, that Robbert found now. Then Attack Of The Timelord was developed in the United States. A very good space shooter. So maybe Philips changed their mind and released Attack Of The Timelord as Terrahawks in Europe, to the disadvantage of the Terrahawks game that was programmed in Europe. But that is just a guess.

Still, the game was good enough for a release. Robbert asked me if I wanted to do that and of course I agreed.

The game is a beast when it comes to accurately manoeuvre the ship, at least in the beginning. The controlling is not easy to come by and it takes time. But once you are experienced to it you get a very good space shooter that is much closer to the Terrahawks world than the game that Philips released in 1983. And it has a great intro, too.

Robbert came up with a great artwork and we decided to release the game as a sequel to the first, very successful Terrahawks as Videopac 70.

Terrahawks: The Second Assault debuted at Eurocon/Retroevent in Elst (Netherlands) on 26th October 2013 and the first copies were available for visitors of the show. It went on general sale on Monday 4th November 2013.

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