Blood Bowl

Tynesoft

Status: No Download, Findability: 1/5

A Games Workshop board game of sorts by Tynesoft in their dying days I think.

The game was first mentioned in around 1989 with Paul Rand from Zzap 64 talking about seeing the preview version in its early stages. He didn’t give too much away about the game at the time, but readers anticipated a release soon.

It wasn’t until around August 1990, almost a year afterwards, that Zzap announced that Tynesoft had closed its doors, whilst still working on Blood Bowl. No doubt had the company continued, the game would have been released.

It is assumed that due to the long development of the game, it must have been in a very late stage of development. Though why it took this long to produce is anyone’s guess.

We have no names of developers, but it could be well assumed that some of the developers were those who worked on the other Tynesoft games at the time. The very same developers who *might* have worked on that bizzare Graham Gooch WC Cricket game which is also in the archives.

In May 2021, FREEZE64’s Vinny Mainolfi spotted on LinkedIn that the artist of Blood Bowl was a chap called Kevin Preston, who had worked on other titles such as Beverly Hills Cop and Superman for Tynesoft. We’re hoping to get in touch with them now to see if they can reveal more about the game.

There is no indication of how this game was really shaping up, how it played or anything else. However, Andrew Fisher located a game in Gamebase which seems to fit the general idea of Blood Bowl, called Plasma Ball which can be found in Gamebase.

The Plasma Ball game seems to be played on a very similar style of grid, which suggests it could be the same game. Why and how did it surface?… We are not quite sure, but before we close the case in any shape or form, we need to try and find out more about both releases. Still with no credits for either title, this could still be a lot of searching. Do you know more?…

Let the search begin!…

Contributions: Vinny Mainolfi

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