Hyper Sentinel – a new retro arcade shoot-em-up Kickstarter

Hyper Sentinel Hyper Sentinel is a forthcoming arcade shoot-em-up for ’80s retro gaming fans which has recently been launched as a Kickstarter courtesy of Rob Hewson and Andrew Hewson, who fans of videogaming back in the day will remember as Hewson Consultants, responsible for two of my all-time ZX Spectrum favourites.

Quazatron is a game I remember playing for hours on end until my fingers stopped working, and I can also recall the Saturday morning I got the bus down to Stockport to buy Technician Ted from Boots, where the counter was run by an irritating bloke with a pencil moustache. He thought he was Don Johnson with his flash suit. However, if I ever had a problem with a game (not with these, but with others), and tried to take it back, if it worked in the store, you had zero chance of getting your money back! I wanted to slap him six ways from Sunday… but enough about one of the many problems I had as a teenager 😉

Hyper Sentinel is very reminiscent of another of their classics – Uridium. I loved a game or three back then, and playing the demo for this game, you can see the similarities, as well as how it’s been updated to give you pin-sharp graphics and fantastic sound, whilst keeping the retro feel.


Oh, and something else back in the day – at school, we used to have open days occasionally to raise funds, and for myself, I decided to contribute to the games side of things by bringing in my ZX Spectrum (I did this in 1986 and ’87, and maybe ’85 and ’88 too, I can’t remember now… I’ve had a sleep since then) and I’d load games for people to play on it, charging about 20p a go.

One kid saw “Dominic Robinson” credited as the programmer on the Spectrum and asked me expectantly, “Did you make this??” I paused, then said emphatically, “Yes!” 😀

Of course, I didn’t, and I wasn’t fantastic in the computer programming side of my Computer Science course at Uni a few years later, but how I wish I’d tried doing what many of the great programmers did to start, by just altering game listings in magazines to see the effect. After all, that’s how I learned .shtml back in 2000 when I set up my website and used that as a basis.

But back to Hyper Sentinel, and for the various pledges you can make, the rewards include a Limited Edition USB Cassette (the game for PC and Mac on a USB stick within a cassette shell), the mobile game on iOS or Android, an eBook of Hints & Tips for Videogame Pioneers by Andrew Hewson – with the option to add a tenner for the paperback version signed by Andrew, a Retrogaming MP3 Album, 4K Mike Berry Artwork Pack, a digital copy of the game on PC, Mac or console, Certificate of Authenticity, Signed Postcard Pack, Exclusive Fridge Magnet, a Classic Hewson game signed by Andrew Hewson, and a Signed A2 poster.

And I haven’t even yet mentioned that the game features 4K graphics in 60fps with pixel-art graphics! 😀

Check out the demo at this Kickstarter link and see the trailer below!


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