A hit on the SNES and a fairly well known arcade from Data East.. Featured two caveman which had to destroy dino’s and basically get through scrolling platform levels which ended with huge guardians to bash hell out off.
Very similar in some ways to Chuck Rock.. Elite lost interest in the scene while the game was still being coded, and it was scrapped along with some other promising releases.
It originally looked as if Eldritch The Cat were actually behind the game. Stuart Fotheringham, who worked as part of the crew helped us with our enquiry into this game…
“Perhaps Marc Dawson was working on Caveman Ninja after I left Eldritch The Cat, but I’m pretty sure ETC was 16-bit only and original software only (no conversions). Steve Wetherill (now a director of Westwood Studios and C&C fame) was also an Eldritch The Cat founder.”
Marc Dawson unfortunatly could not confirm the C64 version, so we are still left in limbo with this game. Who exactly did attempt the C64 conversion then?
Well, Steve Day offered the following…
“ETC had negotiated with a certain UK publisher to develop several versions of Joe & Mac, including the C64 version; however, all I can say is that for various reasons development was never commenced.
So, I guess you can say that we *almost* worked on Joe & Mac C64. :) ”
So maybe the C64 version was scrapped almost before it was started. It might require someone from the top to confirm this one, but we recently had an interesting development in 2009 at Christmas time.
The new High Voltage Sid Collection update came out on Christmas day in 2009 and contained some new tunes from Reyn Ouwehand, one of which included “Caveman ninja”. So it seems that Reyn was to produce tunes for a conversion.
There is only one tune, but maybe when ETC were negotiating with that certain UK publisher (We guess Elite), then maybe this was when Reyn did a test tune. Was there a test demo too? iAN CooG from HVSC asked Reyn for us to see if he could recall the developers, but sadly Reyn could not. Maybe someday he may recall, but more evidence that something exists! Thanks to iAN CooG for also supplying GTW with the correct SID file for the game (Which just has the one tune, compared to the initial release which incorrectly had more tunes).
Could this actually exist??….
Contributions: Stuart Fotheringham, Steve Day, iAN Coog/HVSC, Ross Sillifant
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Update history
29/12/16 – Scan added thanks to Ross Sillifant
Blimey, not just the NES version that was crippled by sloth-like speed and unresponsive controls, seems Amiga version suffered same fate…mere 22% at review in The One, so if Amiga and NES versions suffered, the C64 would probably have been slaughtered.
Zzap64 Issue 74 had it down as Xmas’91 release.Only 8 bit version i’ve heard of is on the NES.Looked great in still shots, but crippled by sloth-like response time, control wise.