Our second Games That Weren’t Christmas update day is for Atari 8-bit fans, with a hugely important discovery and set of findings from the disks of the late Archer Maclean, which GTW has been meticulously preserving thanks to Chris Wilkins (Fusion Retro Books), who has been overseeing and ensuring his work is preserved.
We all know that Dropzone was heavily inspired by Archer’s love of Defender and Stargate in the arcades, though for the first time today, we reveal that before Dropzone – Archer had almost done official conversions of both Defender and Stargate for Atari.
Check out our two new entries which give the full story of what happened, as well as crucially something for you to see and play.
In addition to this, we have also produced a special YouTube video to talk through the findings and the build up of what eventually led Archer to creating Dropzone.
With huge thanks to Chris Wilkins (Fusion Retro Books) for the loan of Archer’s disks to preserve and permission to add executables to the site, Alan Hammerton for hardware help, Mat Allen for the flippy PC drive loan, Ashley Hogg for assistance in looking at one of the prototypes and Bertrand / Atari Frog for guidance and help with tools and formats.
In memory of Archer Maclean – 28 January 1962 – 17 December 2022.
