1988 Gremlin Graphics
Platforms: Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64 (GTW64 entry)
Hill 19 was to be a strategic action-shooter game, very similar to Ikari Warriors/Commando, but with more strategy involved. The player would control a team of characters (believed to be about 3), including Radio and Gunner. Sadly it was never to be though!
You would move turn-based through a vertically scrolling environment (progressing “up the hill”), with foxholes, trenches and terrain that would offer cover and tactical options. Each person would also have a special ability. For example, the Radio Operator could call in airstrikes or medics.
Che Guevara John would mainly work on the Commodore 64 version, whilst Lance Abson would work on the Amstrad CPC edition. Someone called “Cooky” would work on the graphics for both versions.
Che Guevara John recalls that the development got quite far, though with the success of Ocean’s Platoon, Gremlin decided to pivot towards a more story-driven, multi-load and multi-part gameplay format. Development was reassigned and Hill 19 would be scrapped to make way for Butcher Hill instead.
That wasn’t the end for Hill 19 though. Martin Hooley still had confidence in the project, and it was decided to repurpose the game into a new title. Che suggested the name of “Shell Shock”.
The game was continued in-house at Imagitec Design for a few months or so by both Lance and Che, though it wasn’t known at this stage how much work was added and how much further the game progressed. Lance and Che decided though to leave before the game was finished and Lightsource Productions was set up, renting an office just down the road from Imagitec (where they kept a good relationship with the studio).
After preserving what we could of the Commodore 64 edition (of which sadly we were unable to find a playable build), Lance offered to send us disks with the CPC version in the hope that there could be something playable there. Thankfully there was!
Along with some disks with some demo images that Lance pitched to publishers to get work (including an Amiga ball demo), two disk sides had a working copy of Hill 19 (with the title of Shell Shock at this stage). There seems to be about 2 levels present in total, but no sound. However, the game seems to be fully playable and you can shoot enemies and progress up and down the screen.
We’re not 100% sure how to properly play the game and ran out of time whilst preparing our updates, so hope that others will get in touch to help shed more light on the prototype and we’ll update the page. It is a lovely glimpse at a Gremlin game that never was and finally we can see what Butcher Hill could have been.
Here is what the disks contain overall:
- CPC-002A – Source code disk for Hill 19 and test files
- CPC-002B – Hill 19 demo + code files (Run “Hill” to start)
- CPC-003A – Hill 19 demo + code files (Run “Hill” to start) – Seems to be same as CPC-002B
- CPC-003B – Seems to be Blood Valley files and code for CPC (with a test version of loading screen + scroll). Might be some unused assets here.
And thanks to Lance, we have some bonus content and material for you too with some nice game images and demos which Lance used to pitch to publishers to get work:
- CPC-001A + 1B – Demo disks with cool Amiga-ball demos and game images. (Run “menu” to start for both). One of the disks contains what seems to be a demo for a game called “Terminator”, but its missing files. There are also other images not referenced by the menu.
We hope to learn more soon from Lance about the development, but for now – check out the preview! With a huge thank you to Lance Abson for allowing us to preserve the game and present everything here.
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