Arcade Wizzard

A fairly obscure title this time from U.S. Gold. Arcade Wizzard is a pinball game which was briefly mentioned in one or two magazines before disappearing off the face of the earth.

Zzap! 64 was on magazine to feature the game, and included some screenshots in their 1988 Christmas preview section. One thing they described about the game was that it was quite garish. This is what else they had to say…

“Also from US Gold comes a pinball simulation entitled Arcade Wizzard. The action takes place across a series of tables (pinball tables that is), each of which can only be played when a certain qualifying score has been reached.

Play starts on table 1, and if 10,000 is reached, then you can play table two, then table three and so on. In the version that we’ve seen, there are a few strange quirks, such as an old piece of music and an… er… ‘unusual’ control method. (Well, Maff thinks it’s unusual).

Some of the graphics on the preview version are rather hard on the eyes, but we’ll have to wait for the finished product until we know for sure what the game is going to be like – so keep your eyes peeled (Don’t you think that sounds rather disgusting? Well I do. In fact I’ve always thought it was bit odd, right from… (Shut up, Maff!) Oh, alright).”

So from the sounds of things, the game was not shaping up nicely at all. So did U.S. Gold feel this as well? Looking at the table, it seems even more simplistic than pinball games on the C64 from 1984.

For years we found nothing on the game, and no-one from U.S. Gold had any clue about who was behind the game and what happened to it. Some suggested Tiertex were behind it, but no-one from there recognised it.

Then something surprising happened. A developer called Tony Smales got in touch, and whom had been working at Beam Software back in the late 1980s. He did bits of programming and helped out on various projects, and he was given the task of helping to finish a game called Arcade Wizzard. Tony has just done a podcast with This Week In Retro, and what led to that was a chance meeting with a friend where Tony casually mentioned he had worked at Beam.

Tony still had some disks from that time which brought back fond memories, and it was arranged to preserve the disks. Arcade Wizzard consisted of two disks, and it was felt to be the copy he was given to start trying to make fixes for.

It has been confirmed that the developer for the game was Bill McIntosh, and Tony worked alongside him very briefly to help modify and develop parts of the game. It isn’t clear who the artist was for the game, but it was very likely to be either Russell Comte or Greg Holland (who were the main artists at the time).

When it came to music, Tony believes that Gavan Anderson may have handle the music, but we feel its more likely to have been Neil Brennan. The overall design and concept was likely to have been done by Paul Kidd.

What is interesting is that Tony reveals that most games on the C64 done by Beam were built partly using the animation engine that was originally created for the cancelled Inspector Gadget. That engine was considered technically strong internally and was re-used in multiple projects, despite the game being canned.

Also – when you look at the prototype which Tony has kindly passed onto us – you can see that Arcade Wizzard was a much more ambitious game than magazine previews suggested. The game has a progression system, where players start with access to a limited number of pinball tables. You have to beat local arcade “bullies” and make decent scores to unlock further tables.

In total, there were planned to be around 15 different pinball tables, of which you could go into a different arcade and walk up and play each. All of this with some decent cut-scene graphics and sequences. It wasn’t a case of just having 15 pinball tables that you could pick from – you had to unlock them over time.

The prototype is pretty advanced as a result, though really really needs more music – the music (as Zzap alludes in their preview) is pretty simple, and will grate badly after a while. There is a lot of loading, which makes us wonder how this would have translated to tape and could have caused all manner of headaches. We thought there might be about 4-5 tables accessible (might be more!) and asked you to let us know what you find.

Contributor Daniel SA (see comments) did just that and confirmed that you can always play 9 tables across three of the arcades:

• TOPSPIN: Hot Harem, Mine Dump, Drag Strip
• GAMES: Desert Queen, The Mob, Vegas
• ACTION CITY: Lazer Blazer, Black Box, Zipper

There are another 6 in WONDER DOME and MANIC, which are only accessible when reaching unknown goals on the earlier tables. Rat Race is reportedly playable.  So at least 10 tables should be present, but around 15 should be included overall – which makes this prototype far more complete than we anticipated!

The big question is – why was the game cancelled? Tony unfortunately left Beam before seeing the final outcome of the game, therefore the exact reason isn’t 100% clear. However, Tony recalls that the gameplay was proving problematic. The split-screen / flick-screen table presentation was felt to be very clunky and internal discussions were had on making the table scroll smoothly instead.

However, Tony recalls that doing all of these changes would have required some monumental code changes and architecual redesigns. Tony therefore suspects that Beam ultimately concluded that it would take too much effort or budget to fix, the game wasn’t anywhere near the desired quality level anyway and losses were cut before release.

So to play: Load PINBALL_D01S01.d64 – Select “DEMO” and click autostart.

It is plausible that there is a later version out there to be recovered, but this might be the best we will ever find of this long lost U.S. Gold game. A mystery that we have been trying to solve for 22 years this year has finally been solved! Enjoy!

Contributions: Tony Smales, This Week In Retro Podcast, Neil Thomas (The Retro Collective), Dr Ed Young, Daniel SA

Supporting content

• Downloads
• Gallery
• History

Available downloads

• Preview_ArcadeWizzard (zip)

Gallery

Update history

• 20/06/26 – Remains of the game recovered!
• 25/08/20 – Far better screenshots added from Zzap Italia.