Just a quick post to share some odd Ocean related C64 assets I found as I was tidying through some archived disks from Dawn Hollywood (Nee Drake) and Paul Hughes when backing up some old CDs:
These “Time Out” and “Game Over” screens I don’t recognise from anywhere and they were on an unlabelled disk, recovered as deleted files. Not fully sure what format they are, so its possible they may have colour data not showing.
UPDATE: Contributor Hank (see comments) has confirmed that the screens are from Pang! Added how it should look to the above gallery. Mystery solved, though they are slightly different overall, so earlier screens or possibly even from another build.
Then on one of Dawn’s disks is an unfinished/unused loading screen for Vindicators, which attempts to do some hires colouring. In the end it was kept to just a monochrome screen for the final release.
A set of curiosities which we hope you find interesting. Hopefully we’ll find out soon what the Timeout and Game Over graphics were intended for.
The Timeout and Game Over screens look very similar to the little cutscenes in the cartridge version of Pang…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Epia_0h_YcU – in particular check 9m30s on this video.
With that said I thought Pang was developed externally by Arc so perhaps the graphics were tidied up by Ocean internally or there was a Pang V1/V2 with assets used elsewhere?
Hank, you are a star! They are the images! Thanks for confirming, i’ll update the page. I suspect that Ocean were sent the source code and assets to Pang for mastering onto cartridge from Arc Developments, so that explains why Paul had them.
Ahhh makes sense! No worries :)