Cascade were a little company, most famous for their “Ace” series on the C64 and other platforms, and infamous for their “Cassette 50” compilation for almost every machine that existed. In 1988, they gained the rights to a popular TV show of the 80’s, titled 19, and were to create the computer game in two parts, releasing part two at a later date.
Similar to Konami’s “Combat School”, the released “19 Part One” featured training sections such as obstacle courses, shooting, and new features such as driving rough terrain.
The idea was for part one to include the training of the soldier for the Vietnam war, saving your soldier once trained for the next part of the game. Part two was to offer the chance of loading in your saved trained soldier into a war zone environment, with plenty of action packed sequences. Thrilling stuff, we hoped…
19 Part one was only really successful on the grounds of its excellent Rob Hubbard mix of Paul Hardcastle’s classic tune, and the game bombed in sales. 19 could not really compete with the far superior Combat School, and so it remained to be seen if 19 Part Two could ever make up for the disappointment of part one. Only the odd clip of news was mentioned that part two was being worked on, but no screenshots or any new news ever surfaced, and the game disappeared without trace.
Contact with Mark Greenshields has confirmed that the game was in the planning stages, but then Cascade went bust and so the game was never even started. Or so we thought…
Rather interestingly, it seems that there were actually to be two separate games produced for the sequel. With the action game on one side created by the Cascade team, and a second different style of game on the second side… produced externally by Consult Computer Systems by Paul Cole (Who coded Strider on the C64) – see creator speaks for more details.
In total, Paul worked on the game for about 3 months before he left the company. Apparently the game got pulled around the same time, and the second version in particular because the game was impossible to program and impractical ideas according to the developer.
Sadly Paul no longer had anything of the game, so there was little chance of finding anything unless someone came forward.
Well, Mike Lyons recently got in touch with GTW in December 2022 and has revealed that he worked on a Consult Computer Systems version of the game, which got finished but never released. He confirmed that he had taken over from Paul Cole, and that it was a graphical adventure game. Although finished, the collapse of Cascade saw it never got released.
Mike explains that Consult was not a nice place to work, and he had left before the game was finished, but Cascade had agreed to pay him to finish 19. He sadly never got paid. They apparently took the finished product, music, graphics, source code and machine all back.
However, Mike has found some disks – some labelled with “19 graphics”, so it is hoped that there may be something of the game lurking – at the very least graphics that can be shown for the first time. We’re working with Mike now to try and get these preserved in the near future.
Promising progress on a sequel thought long lost.
Contributions: Jazzcat, Mark Greenshields, Paul Cole, Gaz Spence, Marco Das, Mike Lyons
Supporting content
Gallery
Creator speaks
Paul Cole talks about work on 19 – Part 2:
“Game was based upon a hippy writing letters to congress to stop the vietnam war. But the design of it ws too big and too complex, it was suppose to be able to understand letters that were anti-war and score points for them, quite a bit of AI even by today’s standards.
With 19, I think the idea was original it was going to be on the opposite side of the cassette version, or second disk, but the game never got finished. I don’t know who worked on the cascade version, as we were a separate development house.
It was to be separate from their battle games and set in San Fransico.”
Update history
- 19/12/22 – Possible finding of remains of the game.
- 03/12/22 – New coder details revealed.
the game name as stated on the manual of 19 part one = 19 Part 2 Combat Zone
19 part 2 was all part of the promotion for part 1. It was doubtless planned, but after talking to the cascade boss, Nigel Stevens, it never got past the planning stage as far as he recalls.
He could see the writing on the wall when he went to visit EA one day and pulled the plug on Cascade (or rather Artronic as they had morphed into) in 1990/1.
Interestingly though it seems it was started, at least the second of two parts that were in production. Paul Cole was working on a separate game as part of the pack, though not sure how far the Cascade internal version got.
I was looking through an old copy of Zzap! (Xmas 87 issue) and a Cascade advert on page 40 mentions that this game was to be called (19 Part 2 – Viet Nam).
Thanks Gaz! Will add the scan and alternate name now!