The computer game Exile (not to be confused with other games of that name which came later) was created and developed by a couple of friends, Peter J.M. Irvin (me - hi!) and Jeremy C. Smith in the UK.
It was first released for the British 8-bit BBC Micro home computer in 1988, published by Superior Software - the major publisher on this platform. Written entirely in assembler, it was shoe-horned into the machine - carefully hand crafted to work fast in a tiny footprint! Even structuring it to compile was a major challenge in itself.

The game style is 2D multi-scroll arcade adventure, similar to Metroidvania, although it precedes this genre.

The player controls a guy called Finn and starts off in his spaceship, orbiting a strange planet, with a jetpack and a mission: to rescue survivors from the earlier exploratory party. Their last communication said they'd been attacked by forces from below.
A mysterious figure (Triax) teleports into Finn's spaceship and steals the ship's Destinator - a device required for space flight, so he'll need to get that back too!
After jetting down through the turbulent atmosphere to the planet surface he finds the explorer's wrecked spaceship and he must find a means of opening the doorway into the underworld.

Thus begins one long uninterrupted adventure in which he faces diverse hazards: some mechanical, some natural, and some plain unnatural! The planet has many types of life form, and these with some additions, courtesy of the evil professor Triax, populate the planet. The earlier explorers had set up their own base too, with it's own defenses that need to be deactivated. He must solve puzzles and fight battles to progress. On the way he finds different weapons, equipment, and tools to aid him, sometimes needing the assistance of various friendly life forms he encounters.

Exile generates a highly immersive experience for the player. It is very open-ended in that the player isn't being channeled - it feels very open ended. It is helped by the creature AI and realistic free motion in 2D space, with momentum exchange collisions, gravity, and forces like from wind and explosions, fire and water. Exile's content qualifies it to be the first computer game to have a complete physics engine.

Sophisticated for its day, Exile was even released with a novella to create a gripping back story to set the scene and enrich the experience. It was well regarded by players and the media and attained top reviews, and remains one of the most sophisticated and complex games available from that era. 

After first release, it was adapted and enhanced for each subsequent platform: the Acorn Electron, the Commodore 64, then the 16 bit Commodore Amiga, and Atari ST computers (published by Audiogenic).

A special version was developed for the later more advanced Amiga hardware (the AGA chipset) including the Amiga 1200 and Amiga CD32 games console. Sadly, Jeremy died at this point, and the Exile project was left there.

Exile was never released outside Europe, so is still largely undiscovered by the larger proportion of the gaming world ... until now?

After a long rest an opportunity arose and it was recently recoded from assembler code into c and adapted for a mobile device platform as a demo for Alphamosaic Ltd - now part of Broadcom.

This version has now been further improved with many graphical and functional enhancements to suit modern mobile phones and devices - initially for a re-launch on the Apple iPhone.

But it is still faithful to the original game, and if all goes well, you can expect further adaptations to other platforms (Windows Mobile, Android, and Symbian OS), and perhaps new episodes in the future.