Battletoads

Storm

Status: No Download, Findability: 1/5

Another unreleased game which was a planned conversion by Storm for the C64.

The game was mentioned from various sources, including Commodore Power, issue 1, page 9 – saying…

"Mindscape have finally given the Battletoads (NES’s superheroes) a home. After starting life at Storm, battles have been fought, and now they’re part of the Mindscape empire. Expect the C64 version sometime next year, but as of yet we don’t know who will be programming it"

Rob Whitaker (who did a lot of graphical work for Storm) does not recall this game being worked on for the C64, so the game could have been done externally for Storm by someone like Software Creations (Who did Solar Jetman). Chances of us finding something along the scale of Solar Jetman proportions is unlikely.

We do not know much about the conversion apart from its brief news mention in Zzap 64 and Commodore Power. We hope that maybe someone from those days will come forward with some information.

The NES game was quite good, so a C64 version would have been no doubt welcomed.

Recently, Richard Hewison came forward and mentioned that he did a fair bit of work for Mindscape, and saw production of the Amiga version (They said it would be better than sliced bread, but it didn’t quite turn out that way!). Richard is fairly sure that there was no C64 version being planned as the system wasn’t commercially viable at that time. However, Mindscape were planning Paperboy 2 and Captain Planet at the time, so there is always the remote possibility. Maybe it was an external team if any?

There is a final suggestion from Richard that overall it could be just the magazines trying to hype up the dying 8-bit platforms by saying the games were coming soon. This is probably most certainly the case with the likes of Commodore Power, but with mentions also from Zzap 64 – we don’t know.

More research needed, but the memory of its plans are preserved…

Contributions: Rob Whitaker, Andrew Fisher, Richard Hewison

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