- "Federation War" was the working title while the game was being developed.
6 months after starting to work on the game, Mindscape offered to buy it under the name "Project X" and launched a contest in the ACE magazine for people to find a new name (you can view the contest ad here). "Captive" was selected from a contest entry sent by John Millward from Dudley, West Midlands (seen on the right). The programmer prefered "Captive" to "Federation War" and gladly accepted the name. - The "Guard" encounters were added after the programmer saw the artwork created by Jean-Pierre Trevor.
You might notice that the Guard on the artwork has one arm with a red hand and one arm with a normal hand. You can click the artwork to see it better.
- The look of some Captive encounters were inspired by existing characters and toys
ED209 ED209 in the 1987 movie "Robocop" 
Android Robocop in the 1987 movie "Robocop" 
Critter Critter in the 1986 movie "Critter" 
GoBot The 80s toy GoBot. 
R2D2 R2D2 in the movie "Star Wars" 
The camera The Dalek from "Doctor Who" There is also an encounter called "Golly Wog" that would get its name from a character from a series of 19th century children books. Not only the character's name "Golliwogg" isn't spelled the same, but the Captive encounter doesn't look at all like it. When the programmer was asked about the possible connection, he replied "I do know, they were on jars of jam around the time I was writing it!". That's how close it will ever get.
- The game operates under Ratt-DOS, an operating system developed by Captive's programmer. It mainly takes care of memory management (allocating and freeing memory) and floppy disk input/output operations.
- When booting Captive, the screen turns red and green before displaying the introduction bitmap.
- Red: The encrypted system boot code has been successfully generated. Now loading the encrypted Ratt-DOS module.
- Green: The Ratt-DOS code has been successfully loaded. Now generating/decrypting it and loading Captive's boot module.
- The system has the potential to mix encounters within a single cell
In this example, the "ED209", "Dog" and "Golly Wog" are all in the same cell! The programmer decided to not push this possibility further because of balance and gameplay (ie. an encounter that can fly over fire with an encounter that can't) - Nothing can go behind an unpushed pushable wall and that includes your own droids
- There are unused map elements that are single walls panels
This is not a "Photoshoped" picture, it's a real screenshot! - A map cannot have more than
- 2 planet probe computers
- 5 floors
- 8 iris doors (not including the base entrance)
- 8 laser doors
- 9 shops
- 14 encounters holding special objects (passwords and maps)
- 16 grate traps
- 25 elevators (5 shafts of 5 elevators each)
- 32 levers and puzzles combined
- 32 cupboard traps
- 100 walls with decorations
- 510 objects (floor and cupboards combined)
- A maximum of 32 items/projectiles can be flying around.
- Water "spreads" to levels below by falling in holes.
- The Guru message that says "Droids link broken, left mouse to retry" has another version
Captive requires lots of memory to store all the graphics. A specific Amiga version of Captive requires that 1 megabyte machines be used to run it. If this version is executed on a 512 kilobytes machine, this "Guru" message will appear while the game module is loaded preventing the game to run. - Your maximum score can be of 4,294,967,295. The score system is simple; 1 point for each encounter killed.
- The floppy disk of Captive is protected with the Rob Northen Copylock Protection System, a protection required for all Mindscape releases at that time.
- Graphic files are compressed with the RNC (Rob Northen Compression) format.
- As you might already know, the text "Holamap System V5" can be seen on the top-left corner of the Holamap when the zoom level is high enough, but did you know about the "Copyright Ratt 1990 Captive A Mindscape Product" in the cell of the 7th column, last row? and probably you didn't notice the number of destroyed bases in the top-right corner!
- The holamap always has 150 moons, 49 planets and 1 space station
- Ratt-DOS has all the necessary code to pack and unpack Captive saved games, but the feature is not used. It's probably because disk space is not an issue and packing/unpacking takes processing time.
- The music played during the introduction on the Amiga is titled "git5". When the author was asked the meaning of this title, he simply replied "The title git5 was just something quick and easy to type, as I had made loads of tunes over a few months when I first got some tracker software, and was running out of short titles to store them as. So git5 was next on the list."
- The first base is located on planet "Butre". Compared to every other bases that are randomly selected, this location is forced probably because the original location is not as easy. The original location is on "Pelphi" at 96E-61S.
