A Rambo rip off which was found out about thanks to Jax, who started off at Zeppelin games as a young developer.
CPCGames reviews (http://www.cpcgamereviews.com) describes the game as follows:
"A squad of troops has been sent to infiltrate enemy bases. Each troop member takes it in turn to enter and explore each base, firing bullets from his automatic MK gun, and lobbing grenades at turrets, guns and soldiers in trenches. While you’re doing all of this, your real aim is to find a bag containing sensitive documents which has been carelessly placed somewhere in the base, and then go to the laboratory to complete the level. Extra grenades and upgrades to your gun are readily available, and there is a bottle of elixir which restores your strength. The graphics are fairly good, although the sound effects could be better, and despite the game being slightly slow, it’s still nice to play. "
Jax was assigned to this game, but it didn’t get very far when Jax found a few things about Zeppelin:
"I was slated to do it, but they’d just started up and only wanted to pay me as a YTS employee… Writing games back then was fun, but you still need to make a living, and 40 quid a week just wouldn’t cut it so I pissed off to college and Uni instead."
But work was started, and the game got to a movable stage at the very least as Jax explains:
"I did get started, but not much. Just built the basic split-screen scrolling map and a sprite multiplexer, separated off bands for score, etc. We had some test gfx, but it really wasn’t even the start of a game. Nothing survived – like I say, it wasn’t anything worth keeping. "
It is assumed that the graphic artist assigned to the C64 version could well still have some remains of the game, and maybe Jax’s work. It’s a long shot, but otherwise this game could be lost in the depths of time. We are assuming that the graphics were done by Michael Owens, though need confirmation of this. Jax did not specify, but its possible that it was too early in the game’s life to have a graphic artist assigned. We finally assume that Adam Gilmore would have done the music, as he did for pretty much all of Zeppelin’s C64 games in the beginning.
It seems strange that when Jax left, no one picked up this conversion – which is a shame. This could have been a great little budget game. Will we learn any more?
A potentially great game lost?…
Contributions: Jax
Supporting content
Gallery
