When first getting in touch with Chris Harvey about another long lost C64 game, the first thing he responded was that he could have sworn I was about to ask about Dukes of Hazzard.
I wondered if Chris had perhaps got confused with another project, and directed him to the released game in Gamebase64: http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=2385&d=18&h=0
Not a particularly wide spread release or well regarded game on the C64, maybe Chris didn’t realise the game had infact been released after all. He was shocked, and had no idea where this had come from at all. However, this wasn’t Chris’ prototype, and their game was very different indeed.
Asking a bit more about the prototype, Chris revealed that it was written before they had started on Airwolf and was being worked on with Rory Green. The released version according to Chris, looked like a version that Neil A Bate was working on before he had got to Elite. Chris couldn’t recall much apart from that the game had a mechanic where you threw “bombs” (or sticks of dynamite) that exploded and caused ramps to be generated from the craters. This is how you “jumped” in the game.
The game was cancelled due to Airwolf becoming an unexpected big hit and requiring more attention to complete. Dukes of Hazzard got caught up in a mad scramble for a big movie licence (Jewel of the Nile) – which is another story for another day.
When asked if anything may have survived, Chris believes that everything would have been overwritten with Airwolf code when they started that project. Especially as there was no backup HDDs or USB sticks back then! Surely there were some new floppies they could have used?
Contributions: Chris Harvey
Just to add, that the Dukes game that was released seems only to have appeared through an obscure Australian compilation called Hit Pack released through ECP. Elite did not appear to have released it directly and it is surprising why it was dug out at all.
That’s very interesting. I think I saw the cover art, which someone described as looking like it was drawn by a 5-year old.