A first version of Crackdown was indeed in production, with code being done by Mark Kelly before he later went on to working on Golden Axe.
We are not sure quite what happened here, but we know that Bob Stephenson was apparently providing graphics for the game. It seems that there were problems in this first production, and US Gold later called in Arc Developments to get the job done from scratch (who produced a rather good effort).
So the question remains to what happened with the first version, and what was it really like?
Mark got in touch via the comments in November 2025, and confirmed that the game was in production for several months, with all development done on their own Arcanum dev systems (C64->C64). Sadly he hasn’t seen any assets from the game since his days at Probe and as a result could well be completely lost.
It isn’t clear yet why Mark’s edition of the game was cancelled, and we hope to learn more soon to update this page.
Contributions: Mark Kelly
Supporting content
Update history
02/11/25 – Details from Mark W Kelly about the development
There is reference to ARC Developments working on the Crack Down conversion(s) (no specific platform mentioned) all the way back in the July 1989 issue of C&VG – https://archive.org/details/ComputerAndVideoGamesIssue093Jul89/page/n8/mode/1up
This would have just been off the back of the ARC Developments conversion of Forgotten Worlds for US Gold, so perhaps it wasn’t just the case of ARC Developments only being bought in when the Probe C64 version was ‘cancelled’ and that there is a more complicated story to be uncovered.
That’s very interesting. The ARC Dev version wasn’t released until about April/May 1990 – so almost a year after that piece as well. Richard Underhill wasn’t aware of Mark’s edition of the game – so something certainly odd is going on.
I’ve pinged Mark a message, so hope to hear more soon to clarify.
Frank – just wanted to confirm that Crackdown was indeed in production for several months. All the development was on our own (Arcanum) dev systems (C64->C64 based system) Haven’t seen any assets from this project since my days at Probe. Happy to answer any other questions.
Thanks for confirming Mark, i’ll update the page. Will reply to your email shortly!