Apprentice

Rainbow Arts

Status: No Download, Findability: 1/5

A well recieved game on the Amiga, “Apprentice” was to be another great release from Rainbow Arts in 1990.

The game made its way into magazines, via double sided adverts, but as usual the game never surfaced on the C64. The Amiga version featured incredible artworks, and it was fortold that the C64 would follow similiar suite.

Currently, not a lot of information is known about the game,though the Amiga version can be seen online, and it was a cool Alex Kidd/Wonderboy 2 style platformer, which looked good.

Recently, one of the artists was established as Drew Northcott, who claims that Probe were behind the conversion. Drew just did a few bits of missing graphics for them remotely, but doesn’t know who else was involved.

Thanks to contributor Nemo, the World of Spectrum entry on the game has more credits – and there are details about what happened from Brian Beuken:

“[This was] probably the last game I did on Speccy, the machine was dying off and the returns were dropping…shame really as it was a very cool big game even made use of 128K if it was detected. I had a helluva time fitting it in.

It was done and dusted but Rainbow Arts decided to add some more levels to it on the main Amiga version, but this was really pushing things too far on the humble speccy and while I was trying to fit these new levels in it got canned. Shame.”

Interestingly the manual that was present on Hall of Light (and which we’ve added here) contains loading instructions for all the 8-bit verisons. We can understand why the Spectrum version may have been unreleased, but not the C64 – which was still going relatively strong at the time. Rainbow Arts had also been continuing to release C64 games into 1991. Maybe therefore there were issues with that particular conversion?

We checked with Grant Harrison and Nick Jones, and they both confirmed not having any involvement at all on the game. So who was it then?

More research needed, but things progressing well at last!

Contributions: Zeldin, Andrew Fisher, Drew Northcott, Nemo

Supporting content

Available downloads

Update history

15/10/16 – Slight artist credit located.

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 2 Comments

2 Responses to Apprentice

  1. Checking the apprentice Manual
    http://hol.abime.net/3283/manual

    there are not only loading instructions for C64 Cassette/disk (Spectrum & Amstrad too) -(page 4)

    but also the keyboard controls for C64 which implies that the game was not just been planned (page 9)

    Also that Probe was responsible for all the 8 bit versions (page 22).

    I guess you are already aware of the Apprentice entry in World Of Spectrum
    http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0009488
    where there is a magazine preview
    and some more info that the game’s production was somewhat close to completion and why it was canned e.t.c.

    • Thanks Nemo! Should have spent more time doing a bit more research, so appreciated you digging these bits out. Updating the page now :)

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