1994 Ocean Software
Platform: Commodore Amiga and CD32
A short entry for now to highlight that Ocean Software had once signed a deal with Electronic Arts to convert a bunch of their SEGA Mega Drive titles to the Amiga. One of those titles would be a conversion of NHL Hockey.
Now, ports of Shaq Fu and Jungle Strike would make it, but NHL Hockey would never see the light of day, even though its suggested by Amiga Games magazine from July 1994 that it would be coming soon. So what happened, and was anything ever started?
In a twist of fate perhaps, recent work by Games That Weren’t with the Enigma Variations archives has unearthed a source code repository for the Mega Drive game and an accompanying build (which is already out there in the wild). This was located interestingly within a folder named “Ocean”.
There is no evidence sadly that any conversion work was started, though there is evidence the files were being looked at around May 1994 – which correlates with the time of the Amiga Games report (if you think they were about 1-2 months behind schedule). We’ll try and get confirmation soon from Mark Greenshields, but we believe that Ocean approached Enigma Variations to do a conversion.
Why the conversion was never actually started is a good question. Perhaps due to the collapse of Commodore around that time, it was decided to focus on just a small subset of games to convert, and NHL Hockey was a casualty. Or did Ocean pass the project onto another team? If you know anything more, please do get in touch!
With thanks to Karl Kuras for highlighting and to Archive.org for scans.
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