Our next entry came up by chance when a contributor spotted our video at Zzap Live 2025, and mentioned working on a game called Drive (or Drive where the “i” was replaced with an actual eyeball). The game was pitched to Zzap64 after they put in a request for reader-created games that they could publish on their cover tapes.
Rowan Crawford had been working on a game called Twilyte (influenced by the name Armalyte), but it was becoming clear the project would take years to complete – and so focus switched to a smaller project.
At the time, Rowan was playing a DOS game called Pipe Dream, and he felt this would translate well to the C64. He decided to make it about a car that you drive around a track, that you the player would create. I’ll hand over to Rowan to explain more about the game:
“The car would be given a starting position and you could see the next 3 or 4 tiles in your stack, and you used the joystick to position and rotate the tiles before the car would start driving, and you could continue to place tiles until the car either reached its target distance or crashed.
There were corners, straights, and jumps that would let you jump over any distance so long as there was a place to land in that direction.
Each level had a different colour scheme, a shorter starting time limit and a larger target distance to reach. I remember there were 12 levels with level 12 set in space (I’ll come back to that). I think level 11 vibrated left and right. I don’t remember if I had different tiles that made it more difficult as you progressed through the levels but I hope there was more to it than I remember.
The car was made from several layers of high-res sprites and there were a lot of frames of rotation. Seemed like half the 7 months of development was spent getting corners to work perfectly from and to every direction.”
In the end the game took half an hour to compile, and then it was a case of resetting the computer, loading the data and code into the right places. The game was simple, but the presentation was nothing of the sort. When the game loaded, you saw a mountain and stars, then a beam of light would hit the mountain and a car would appear. It then cut to a bitmap image of the car (possibly a red Lamborghini Countach copied out of a magazine).
It then cut to the main title screen which had “DRIVE” written in large letters (except for the “I”, replaced with a 3×3 sprite large blinking eye ball) and a multiple frame of animation ripped out of a demoscene demo.
“I think that title screen showed credits (including credits to the demo where the eyeball had come from and other demo that I wanted to use the music from, also naively).
I didn’t know how to make music or sound effects so when I sent the game to people I included a (demoscene) demo with a piece of music that I thought suited the game. I late discovered that the music was actually Matt Gray’s track from the game Driller.
After you beat level 12 you’re given a code. You can then load yet another .prg that was included on the disk where it will ask you for the code, and when you enter the code you see the end-game animation. This animation shows a Battlestar Galactica-like scene of spaceships flying together through space and there, in the center of them, is our red car for some forever unexplained reason.”
The mostly completed game was then sent to Zzap, but Rowan heard nothing more. When he did get a reply, it was from under the name of Commodore Force. They liked the game a lot, but there was a commercial game release, reviewed around the same time of the same type, and didn’t want to risk publishing something that competed. Anyone know what game that may have been? Locomotive perhaps?
Rowan therefore used the game to try and get a job in the games industry, sending along with any pixel art he was doing to any Australian/UK game studio he could find an address for. He heard back from Animagrafx (Australia) and Team 17 (UK). He took a job with the Australian firm.
Sadly Rowan lost his copy of the game, so tried reaching out to Martyn Brown of Team 17, who didn’t remember it. Over the years he’s asked Zzap64/Commodore Force writers, but no-one remembers the game. Perhaps Ian Osborne recalls it? It’s likely it was caught up in the closure and sale though.
It seems very likely that this could sadly be lost – but who knows what might be out there. If it rings any bells to anyone, then please get in touch!
Contributions: Rowan Crawford, Paul Davies
