One of the great things with hunting for unreleased games, is that they can turn up under the oddest of circumstances. When Hedning/Genesis Project got in touch to say he had found something surprising in a collection of Dutch disks, this was certainly a case of just that!
Dominion is not to be confused with the Zzap64! cover tape game of the same name, but is a sideways scrolling Delta-style shooter by the programmers of Master Blaster and Black Tiger, Mark Hughes and James Doyle. The game wasn’t really known about, but the clues were there thanks to a music demo released by Mark Tait back in the day.
After creating Master Blaster and whilst the game was being shopped around to publishers, Mark and James got to work on creating Dominion, enlisting Stephen Chandler and Peter Wolfe on graphics. Dave Baxter (a producer at Elite who then set up Micro Media) arranged for Mark Tait to do the music, but after pitching the game around – no publisher was interested unfortunately.
Dave would end up moving to U.S. Gold and got the group to convert Black Tiger, and Dominion was swiftly forgotten about for many years. That is – until a set of Dutch disks were being processed, and Hedning came across the file and initially got in touch with GTW to see if we knew anything about the game at all (which we wouldn’t have done).
Thankfully, before we could confirm anything – Hedning was able to get hold of Mark Hughes to confirm the story about the game which has been relayed above. A full creators speaks from Mark can be found below as well telling the story.
So, after over 35 years, this long lost game has been recovered, and you can play it for yourself! It is complete too – so check it out for yourself!
Contributions: Hedning/Genesis Project, Zyron, Paladin, Richard Bayliss, Joshua Dove
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Game_Dominion (zip)
Gallery
Creator speaks
Creator speaks and background courtesy of Hedning/Genesis Project
This formerly unknown game, developed by some of the prominent C64 game makers behind Master Blaster (Zeppelin Games, 1988), Black Tiger (U.S. Gold/Capcom, 1990), and Hydra (Domark/Tengen, 1992) – namely Mark Hughes, James Doyle, Peter Wolfe, and Steven Chandler, with music by Mark Tait – was discovered on a random, likely Dutch, floppy disk. How it ended up there remains unknown.
The game’s music, however, was already known thanks to a music demo released by Mark Tait – though there was no mention or trace of a game actually using it.
To shed some light on this mystery, we reached out to one of the game’s programmers; Mark Hughes – still active in game development today – and we’re delighted to be able to hare some background on this
remarkable find:
“As a bit of background, four of us on the credits were all friends from school, me, James Doyle, Peter Wolfe and Stephen Chandler. James and I had learned how to code over the summer of ’87 (we were around 16 years old), made some demos, and sent them out to publishers in the hope of getting some work.
Dave Baxter, a producer at Elite Games at the time, wrote back and suggested that we could rip off a new game that was going to be launched in the arcades later that year, Blasteroids. He wanted to do this on the side though, not through Elite, so setup his own Company called Micro Media.
Then he organised graphics and music from other people. We finished “Master Blaster” in early ’88, and Dave started going round publishers trying to sell it. While that was happening, James and I started on Dominion, and enlisted Peter and Stephen to do the graphics.
Master Blaster eventually sold to Zeppelin Games, so we thought Dave could maybe sell Dominion too, so we sent him a copy, then he organised Mark Tait to do the music. Once it was complete, Dave tried to get it published, but no-one was interested.
By now Dave was working at US Gold, and thought our team might be a good fit to convert one of their arcade licenses, Capcom’s Black Tiger, so we started working on that, and Dominion was forgotten about.”
