Time Bandit - The Excalibur Part 1

[@williamdunlevy]

Wow - love your video playlist of Time Bandit. It was fun to code the game. I'm not sure how anyone could have ever actually finished playing it without some form of "help". I was always glad to hear when people played it enough to discover that many of the maps got quite larger at the higher levels. 8 hours of video - if you're ever in Ann Arbor, MI, please let me buy you drinks!

[@fommof]

@Chelseacf, thank you so much for this video...i was lucky enough to own an Atari 1040ST back at the 80ies and this specific game was my all time favorite! Thanks again!!!

[@therealMrMackem]

This is alot more sureal than I remember! Thanks for posting

[@Bloodburn]

I played that game for hours and hours and days when i was like 10, the sounds of collecting items is burned into my brain matter and I didn't understand any of the puzzles but kept exploring for no good reason. The coral area I always thought was a sponge world in space.

[@williamdunlevy]

Clay Cowgill Thanks! The size of the playing window was partly a matter of how much scrolling I could eke out of the MC68000 running at 8MHz. Another factor was that the maps were designed and encoded on a grid of 64x64 blocks, and the different areas in each map all had to fit on this flat 2D grid. If the playing window was too large, you would see other places of the map (up or down ladders, transported, etc.) which really were just all adjacent to each other on the 64x64 grid. I think all the maps had multiple parts except Welkin Island, which was a single large 64x64 area.

[@CmotDribbler]

I just want to say I loved this game as a kid, played the hell out of it, only world I ever managed to beat was the pacman one :P all the rest I would die before getting to the last level, but never stopped me from trying, the varied adventure, theme, and puzzles of each area was a fantastic and even now unique experience, so thanks!

[@jameskrolak]

If you watch, you can see that he never loses a life while playing. He found some sort of cheat code or hacked the game, somehow.

[@ClayCowgill]

So Bill, I gotta ask-- was the size of the scrolling area determined by what you could comfortably scroll with the 68K or was there some other reason it was a relatively small window vs. the map? (BTW, we played the two-player for DAYS back then. Great job!)