Throne Of Fire

Melbourne House

Status: Preview, Findability: 4/5

Throne of Fire was due to be published by Melbourne House, and saw release on both the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC platforms. The C64 version was never to appear, despite adverts.

The game was designed by Mike Singleton and was a graphic adventure, where the action took place across 100 rooms of the Burning Citadel. The objective was to seize the power of the Citadel; achieved by a player taking his Prince to the Throne Room after disposing of the other two Princes. On gaining the Throne, that Prince would then become King, power would be his and the crown presented.

The game came with a split screen display where two players could play, or single player against the computer. It was very much a medieval Spy Vs Spy game, with the Princes able to pick up various weapons and fight when they met in a room.

So after various adverts, what happened to the Commodore 64 version? Chris Pink got in touch with GTW and told us that he did the Amstrad version of the game. It was found that Tim Rogers and Darrin Stubbington (Stoat and Tim) were behind the conversion on the C64, which was one of their first big titles.

GTW got hold of Darrin Stubbington, thanks to Craig Grannell, and found that the game had not been completed. One castle was up and running with a character running about. The game was basically very hard to be copied from the Spectrum and Amstrad, due to some particulars of their hardware, so there were some changes. Darrin informed GTW that Tim Rogers was the coder.

Eventually, we managed to find Tim and we asked about the game. Imagine our surprise though when Tim supplied an attachment with all the remains of the game! The files were broken, but Glenn Rune Gallefoss kindly helped fix everything for GTW.

The preview here is all that ever existed. Featuring a loading/title screen, and also a playable early preview showing two screens and controllable characters. It’s not really playable at this early stage, but you can get a general feel and see that it was shaping up nicely. You will notice that the split has been done horizontally rather than vertically on the C64 edition, but works well.

A huge recovery for GTW and another big title preserved. Sadly the reason the game was never released was due to problems and delays that Stoat and Tim had. Due to the delays, Melbourne House learned that the game was not a run away success like they hoped on other formats, and thus decided to cancel the C64 development that was late at this stage.

Thankfully Tim was meticulous enough to keep his work, so here it is for your enjoyment!

Contributions: Glenn Rune Gallefoss, Chris Pink, Darrin Stubbington, Tim Rogers, Mat Allen

Supporting content

Available downloads

Update history

25/08/21 – Tidy up of the review.

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 1 Comment

One Response to Throne Of Fire

  1. Wow.Great result, recently saw the advert for this one and thought, bloody hell, what became of that?.

    Cheers Frank.

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