Thanks to Shaun for flagging up a title which was the competition winner for a Zzap compo to design your own game and win £500.
This was ran in 1987, and Shaun was the lucky winner – where the game would be then created by Domark’s new budget label called Streetwise – who had earlier published another competition game called “Kat-Trap”.
For reasons currently unknown, the game never surfaced, and neither did the Spectrum compo winner called Pile Driver.
Was it possibly due to Kat Trap bombing so spectacularly that Domark decided not to take a risk again? We’re not sure!
Shaun has for now detailed under Creator Speaks what the game would have been like. Now its a case of finding out if anything was ever started!
Contributions: Shaun Pearson
Supporting content
Gallery
Creator speaks
Shaun recollects about how the game should have been:
“Photo copies of the original design have gone missing. I do remember clearly what they contained:
Image of the Cable Run logo.
Image showing screen layout, designed to give an instant impression of how the game might/should look.
Images of the characters involved. These included:
Lead/Player character – A Kung-Fu type guy, wearing black trousers and white top.
Victim – She was either the Sister or Girlfriend of the Lead/Player character
Big Boss – Fat old guy, the one holding the Victim to ransom.
Play area was top down similar to Bounder, Sensible Soccer.
In typical Arcade fashion, there were 5 levels planned. Level 1 was to take place over a cityscape. Level’s 2 to 5 over other locations (Forest I recall being one of them).
If you watched the opening to Vanilla Sky, you’ll get an idea of what I had in mind. Future versions of the game, say on the Amiga could have really pushed the idea further. At the time, the game design was based around what I perceived the C64 was capable of doing.
High up in the sky, where the action takes place, there are 5 Cables running vertically down the screen. 1 Char wide, the cables would have been animated to give an illusion of parallax scrolling. The cables would have been hires yellow.
At the start of each level, there are 5 cables. Cables disappear 1 by 1 as the level progresses. With 1 cable remaining at the end. Should the (generous) time limit reach 0, the final cable disappears. The reason for the disappearance of the cables is simple: The enemy are cutting them, to hinder the Players progress.
Game-play: The Player faces forward at all times. The Player can run forward or backwards along the Cable. The Player can jump left or right onto other cables. The Player can kick while on the cable or while jumping. Imagine Kung Fu Master, top view, 1 char wide, repeated 5 times next to each other, then imagine the action of Enemies running from top and bottom of the screen. That’s how Cable-Run might play out.
The design doc was all of 2 pages long, as I wanted not to bore the judges, and get the point across using images and words in an instant.”
