A short entry for a game that has seen a release, but only it seems in the US and Spain. Australian/Aussie Games was a sports multi-event that was created by Beam Software and a sort of piss-take of California Games.
Martin/Stadium64 got in touch as it seems that the game was actually due for release in the rest of Europe by U.S. Gold. When you look at the Spanish release, it has a different loading screen with U.S. Gold mentioned the U.S. Gold loader and PAL fixes not present in the Mindscape version.
However, oddly the tape edition released in Spain seems a bit unfinished, with a basic options screen and a seemingly rough/rushed loading screen.
One possibility is that Mindscape were planning to release games in Europe themselves, or was it that U.S. Gold thought it would be too close a competing/confusing title to California Games which they had previously released?
In June 2026, Beam developer Tony Smales got in touch after doing a podcast with This Week In Retro. He passed on some disks that had been preserved as part of this, and we were given a very interesting prototype of Aussie Games.
This particular prototype was to be the Australian release of the game. Tony tells us that Fred Milgrom was the driving force behind the concept and was thinking: “Epyx have California Games, we can do an Australian version”.
For years, only Gregg Barnett has been listed as a developer, though Tony tells us that there were several developers – one person doing each game. Bill McIntosh in particular was one of the main developers on the game, and Bruce Bailey wrote roughly 90% of the Fishing event, which Tony inherited and finished off.
This copy was what Tony was provided to make fixes to the Fishing event, and its likely before those fixes were made. There should be a bug present, where occasionally when launching, something will shoot upwards off-screen incorrectly and then return.
It seems that some events might not be present yet either (or at least we couldn’t get some to load after some disk swapping). There are a number of changes too present. It seems the bottle shooting sub-game was toned down to “Soda bottles” to move away from drinking/alcohol themes – but its all here as was intended originally.
Tony vaguely recalls that Belly Flop was a replacement for another event that was dropped – due to being inappropriate and potentially problematic for age ratings and international release. We think that it was likely just the beer bottle shooting sub-game that was the issue, and this wasn’t dropped – but just modified.
There could be a lot more differences present – let us know what you find, and we’ll be sure to keep updating this page.
Why was the European and Austrailian versions not released? For the European editions, Tony feels that it was likely U.S. Gold decided they didn’t want something too close to California Games to cause confusion. It isn’t so clear for the Australian edition – we can’t see why it wouldn’t have been released there and Tony wasn’t sure what the reasons were.
Hopefully more will surface over time, but for now – enjoy this great prototype curiosity!
Contributions: Martin/Stadium64, Retrocollector.org, Tony Smales, This Week In Retro Podcast, Neil Thomas (The Retro Collective), Dr Ed Young
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Prototype_AussieGames (zip)
Gallery
Update history
20/06/26 – Australian unreleasd edition prototype recovered and added
it’s not so odd that the tape version had to be cut down in the unnecessary parts, compared to the disk version. Less loading time
Yeah – that is true, and could well be the reason. Though the different loading screen seems a bit strange still.
Didn’t know that it was a spanish exclusive! :)