At an exhibition, Julian Rignall walked up to the Hewson stand and picked up the joystick for a game nobody had seen before. As he nudged it, the tower on the screen turned. Andrew Hewson watched Rignall lean forward, “wide-eyed, fixated on the screen”, and thought: “Sold!” Nebulus was a platform game in which the platforms wrapped round the outside of a tower, and the tower rotated as its hero walked. By Christmas Rignall’s magazine, ZZAP!64, had given it a Gold Medal.
Fast facts
- Author: John M. Phillips, credited in the reviews as the game’s programmer. His previous game for Hewson was Impossaball (1987).
- Publisher: Hewson Consultants.
- Released: late 1987 for the Commodore 64 (£8.95 on cassette, £12.95 on disk) and the ZX Spectrum (£7.95). A version for the Amstrad CPC followed in 1988, and Amiga and Atari ST versions by the end of that year.
- Hero: Pogo, a small green creature working for Destructo Inc.
- Other names: Tower Toppler in the United States; Castelian on the NES.
- Award: Best Original Game at the Golden Joystick Awards, March 1988.
- Sequel: Nebulus 2: Pogo-a-Go-Go (Amiga, 1991).
The idea
According to Andrew Hewson, Phillips first showed him a demo of something rotating vertically, and at that stage was thinking of joining towers together into the battlements of a medieval castle. The idea of a platform game wrapped round a single tower came out of their discussions, and Hewson said it was the Hewson game that pleased him most “because I helped to shape it conceptually”.
The story on the box was light. Someone had built eight towers in the sea of the planet Nebulus without planning permission, and Destructo Inc sent Pogo to knock them down. He arrives at the foot of each tower by submarine, climbs to the door at the top before a time limit runs out, and the tower sinks into the sea behind him.
How the tower turns
The trick was to keep Pogo still. The Games Machine explained that he “stays centrally placed while the tower scrolls smoothly around him, and it is the revolving ledges at different heights that create a sense of depth”. Walk left or right and the tower turns under his feet, bringing new steps, lifts and doorways round from behind. Walk up a flight of steps or ride a lift and the screen scrolls vertically. ACE called the result a “rotary scroll” and pointed out the finishing touch: when Pogo steps into one of the tunnels that run straight through the tower, the tower spins through 180 degrees and he pops out on the other side.
The effect had its costs. On the Amiga ZZAP!64’s reviewer noticed that the rotation slowed “ever so slightly” when a lot of balls were bouncing round the tower, and on the Spectrum the towers were drawn in a single colour. The Games Machine thought a little more colour could have been used on the ledges, if each had been exactly one character high.
Playing it
Few of the tower’s inhabitants can be killed. Bouncing balls and flashing blocks can be shot, but others can only be stunned or dodged, and none of them kill Pogo outright: they knock him off his ledge. If a lower ledge catches him he loses only time; if nothing does, he falls into the sea and loses a life. Some ledges crumble, some rise as lifts and some carry him along like conveyor belts. The Games Machine concluded that Nebulus was “more a game of timing and pattern learning” than a shooting game.
On the Commodore 64 and the Amiga, Pogo’s submarine trip between towers became a bonus game: he fires bubbles at fish, collects the fish he traps and scores points for each one, over a horizontally scrolling seabed with seven levels of parallax. The Spectrum version has no bonus stage.
Reviews
Reviewers agreed about the tower and differed on how long the game would hold them.
| Magazine | Machine | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Sinclair User, November 1987 | Spectrum | 10/10, a Sinclair User Classic |
| ZZAP!64, December 1987 | Commodore 64 | 97%, Gold Medal |
| The Games Machine, December 1987 | Commodore 64 / Spectrum | 90% / 87% |
| CRASH, December 1987 | Spectrum | 85% |
| ACE, January 1988 | Commodore 64 / Spectrum | 943 / 917 (out of 1,000) |
| Your Sinclair, January 1988 | Spectrum | 9/10 |
| Amstrad Action, June 1988 | Amstrad CPC | Mastergame |
| ZZAP!64, Christmas 1988 | Amiga | 97% |
ZZAP!64 was the most excited. One reviewer defied “anyone to play it and keep their cool”, comparing its “just another go” pull to Boulder Dash, and another noted how little fuss had preceded it: “one demo game at the PCW show, and that’s about it.” CRASH was cooler. Its reviewers liked the cute graphics and the title music and wished for more colour, and the caption under the screenshot asked “how much depth?” Your Sinclair gave it 9/10 all the same, grumbling only about the lack of colour and about having to clamber back to the top after a tumble.
The Amiga version, by Phillips, was more than a straight conversion. As well as reflections in the water and holes through which the player can see the far side of a tower, it had a second mission with a whole new set of towers. “If you thought the 64 version was tough, just try mission 2 on the Amiga,” ZZAP!64 warned. An ST version was ready by October 1988, when The One put a specially made level on its first cover disk.
In March 1988 readers of Computer & Video Games voted Nebulus the Best Original Game at the Golden Joystick Awards, and Andrew Hewson collected the award.
Phillips after Nebulus
CRASH reported in 1988 that Phillips had moved to 16-bit machines, and that his Atari ST game Eliminator was being converted to the Spectrum. The same year the Spectrum programmers CRASH surveyed kept naming him: Steve Turner listed Phillips and Raffaele Cecco as the programmers he admired most, and Dominic Robinson said of Phillips that “his ideas are always original, and he’s so competent technically as to be able to implement them well”.
Tower Toppler and Castelian
In the United States the game was released as Tower Toppler, the name it still carries on the US edition of THEC64 Mini, which includes it. The game also reached Nintendo’s console in a new form: Zzap! in Italy reviewed Castelian, “the conversion of Nebulus for the NES”, in December 1991.
The original was sold again in 2008 on the Wii’s Virtual Console. Retro Gamer was unimpressed twenty years on, giving it 62% and calling it “a classic example of style over substance” whose tower was still “an amazingly clever trick”.
Nebulus 2
ZZAP!64 announced a sequel in its January 1990 issue. It was being programmed not by Phillips but by Infernal Byte Systems, three young Germans led by Florian Sauer who, The One said, had to fit the work round their homework, with Phillips working with them. According to The One, Hewson had been sent their Amiga conversion of Paradroid, found that Andrew Braybrook was already doing one, and was impressed enough to offer them Nebulus 2 instead. Sauer drew on Phillips’s original source code. The plan was for 20 new towers, four of them lying on their sides.
Hewson went into receivership in the spring of 1991, when ZZAP!64 was still calling the sequel “long-awaited”. Nebulus 2: Pogo-a-Go-Go came out on the Amiga later that year from 21st Century Entertainment, the company Andrew Hewson ran after Hewson’s collapse. ACE did not like it: the original had judged the balance between addiction and frustration, it said, while Nebulus 2 “steps over it like it wasn’t even there”.
Sources
- Steve Jarratt (ed.), Commodore 64: A Visual Commpendium (Bitmap Books, 2014), p. 73: Andrew Hewson on Julian Rignall at the exhibition stand; developer credited as John M. Phillips.
- The Story of the Commodore 64 in Pixels (Fusion Retro Books, 2016), p. 179: Andrew Hewson on Phillips’s first rotating demo, the castle battlements and the game “wrapped around a tower”.
- ZZAP!64 issue 32, December 1987, pp. 156–157: Commodore 64 review, Gold Medal (the eight towers, Destructo Inc, the submarine bonus level, “one demo game at the PCW show”); p. 7 contents; the Hewson price in the issue’s mail-order page. ZZAP!64 issue 38, June 1988, review index: 97%.
- CRASH issue 47, December 1987, pp. 12–13: Spectrum review (author John M Phillips, £7.95, three lives, falls that cost only time, “how much depth?”). Issue 48, January 1988, review index: 85%.
- The Games Machine issue 2, December 1987, pp. 52–53: “Pogo-a-Gogo”, Commodore 64 and Spectrum review (Pogo “stays centrally placed”, “more a game of timing and pattern learning”, the Commodore bonus level, prices, 90% and 87%).
- ACE issue 4, January 1988, p. 68: review (“rotary scroll”, the 180-degree turn through the tunnels; ACE ratings 943 and 917).
- Your Sinclair issue 25, January 1988: Spectrum review, 9/10.
- Sinclair User issue 68, November 1987, pp. 32–33: Spectrum review by Graham Taylor. The 10/10 score is given by the Everygamegoing review archive (web, secondary), https://www.everygamegoing.com/larticle/Nebulus-000/36351; Sinclair User issue 71, February 1988, lists Nebulus among its Classics.
- Amstrad Action issue 33, June 1988: Amstrad CPC review, a Mastergame.
- ZZAP!64 issue 44, Christmas 1988, p. 170: Amiga review (£19.99, John Phillips, the reflections, mission 2). ZZAP!64 issue 74, June 1991, Amiga review index: 97%.
- The One issue 1, October 1988: the Atari ST Nebulus level on the cover disk.
- Computer & Video Games issue 79, May 1988, pp. 38–39: Golden Joystick Awards, Best Original Game, collected by Andrew Hewson.
- CRASH issue 51, April 1988, p. 117 (Phillips’s next projects) and issue 59, Christmas 1988, p. 97 (programmers’ choices; Phillips and Eliminator).
- ZZAP!64 issue 57, January 1990: Nebulus 2 announced (Infernal Byte Systems; Phillips working with them). The One issue 22, July 1990: Nebulus 2 development feature (Florian Sauer, Paradroid, the original source code, 20 towers). ZZAP!64 issue 73, May 1991: Hewson in receivership, “the long-awaited Nebulus 2”.
- ACE issue 50, November 1991: Nebulus 2 review (publisher 21st Century Entertainment).
- Zzap! (Italy) issue 62, December 1991: Castelian review.
- Retro Gamer issue 20, 2005: Nebulus “aka Tower Toppler”. Retro Gamer issue 55, 2008: Virtual Console review, 62%.
- Codetapper, “THEC64 Mini games” (web, secondary): Nebulus renamed Tower Toppler for the US edition. https://codetapper.com/c64/rants/thec64-mini-games/