Rise of the Robots

1995 Acclaim Entertainment

Platform: SEGA Master System

A very short entry for now on a Master System conversion of Rise of the Robots that never was – or was it? The game itself is famous for looking amazing, but not playing particularly great.

When you boiled down the graphics onto 8-bit platforms, then you were really in trouble. However, developer Clive Townsend would give it his best shot, but he was really up against it with a poor design to implement.

Rise of the Robots
Palette fixed version of the GG options screen in Master System mode, thanks to Clive Townsend!

Not only was Clive working on the Game Gear edition, but simultaneously he would be developing the game for the Master System too. The only real differences were with the palettes and the screen layouts to adjust for the different size screens.

For reasons unknown, the game never saw a release on the Master System and only on the Game Gear. Perhaps the market at that point had dried up too much, and it was only felt the Game Gear edition would sell.

Clive suggests that apart from the palette and screen size differences, both versions were identical and were based off the same codebase. He suggested that maybe plugging in the Game Gear cartridge into a Master System could even trigger the lost version.

Sadly, that wouldn’t be the case – though interestingly some parts of the game screen do extend – showing elements that would have been visible only on the Master System edition (see gallery).

It would be amazing if there was some kind of flag in the code to switch between a Game Gear and Master System mode – but we doubt it very much. However, if anyone manages to hack around and find anything interesting – please let us know.

Clive no longer has anything of the code or a Master System cartridge, so finding a proper version of the game for the platform would be reliant on a prototype being found from perhaps the artist or someone else who was involved with the game. If you know anything more about the development, then please do get in touch.

With thanks to Glenn Stubberfield for flagging up and Clive Townsend for discussing and for the palette fixed images to show how they would have looked.

Gallery

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4 Responses to Rise of the Robots

  1. Good spot Frank!

    I’d spoken to Clive several years ago (lovely guy, even sent me his Rise poster as a freebie!).

    He was absolutely adamant that the MS version is out there somewhere.

    I figured the best place to keep looking would be the Brazillian market (Mercado Livre etc).

    No such luck though and my guess is Clive had the MS version complete and ready to go and probably submitted the code but it was just quietly cancelled.

    This would have been very late 1994 / early ’95 and outside of the South American market, the MS was completely dead.

    • I’m hoping that it might be a case of changing some flags in the code to open up the game to work in SMS mode. Clive seemed to think that the codebase was identical, just had some flags set. I had hoped that converting the GG cart to SMS would work, but the palettes were of course all wrong. It would be amazing if the proper prototype of the SMS version did surface in the future.

    • Ah very interesting! I think the code is in the GG version, just needs unlocking and a bit of tweaking with the pallets – so its on the right tracks! You can see the extended score area in the proper colours for instance.

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