Spectre co-author here. Neat to see this! The backstory of Spectre is that we wrote a straight-up Battlezone clone just as a hobby project, then decided that it was worth commercializing and so we fiddled around just enough to make it not be a copyright violation. It's influences all the way down. :-)
Thanks so much for Spectre, it's one of my absolute favourite games from my school days. I couldn't count the number of times we got after-school detention for sneaking into the Macintosh labs at lunch time to play Spectre. We taught ourselves to pick the lock on the lab door then locked ourselves in and played with the volume right down, usually only getting in trouble because of us laughing and egging each other on.
It's one of the big things that got me into computers in the first place, and holds a special place in my heart. Everyone else geeks out over SNES nostalgia but we were absolutely Spectre teens.
I did some contracting for Velocity on Spectre VR, back in the day (AWE32 sound driver), and have fond memories of working with Mike Lyons on that project .. we were astounded when we found a copy of the DOOM demo project on the Velocity BBS, uploaded by someone who said "you guys should check out this other multiplayer PC game that is going to eat your lunch" .. and yeah, we spent a lot of time playing that game, in between spotting "Whale or Submarine?" from the Embarcadero offices .. any chance you know what Mikes' up to these days? I lost contact with him when he went to work for Microsoft ..
One thing I remember fondly about Spectre (or one of its versions) is it coming with a first-person cyberpunk-style narrative about some protagonist character "rezzing" into the virtual tank world. As a kid, it was probably my first exposure to the genre, long before I came across Gibson. Is that story available online anywhere?
For the record, Neal Stephensons' "Snow Crash" was required reading at Velocity around the time of the Spectre VR release, I got my first copy of it directly from the general manager of Velocity at the time, he pulled it out of a box of them he had at hand ..
Best I can recall, that was written by someone at Velocity (the publisher, as discussed by boffinAudio's sibling comment). No idea where to find it online.
I believe I still have an unopened boxed copy of the original game somewhere in the attic, I could break it out and scan it...
