A short entry for what we believe is a missing conversion of Eskimo Eddie, and highlighted thanks to Vinny Mainolfi at FREEZE64 after doing a feature on the game.
Vinny had covered the game Ice Busters, and found that there was also an entry in Gamebase64 for Eskimo Eddie. However, there seems to be no evidence at all that Ocean released the game, so we’re not sure where the GB64 entry has come from and if it was a leaked version. The loading screen is a conversion from the ZX Spectrum version, which was released (but only featured the Pengo style of game).
If you look at the title screen for both released versions, there is clearly an area where the Ocean logo would have been, and this has been modified to “Firm” or “Cascade” – though it is still the distinctive blue looking text/outline.
David Selwood (developer of the game) had worked on a number of titles for Ocean Software, including Mr Wimpy, so we believe that this was indeed a proper Eskimo Eddie conversion. Now its a question of finding out what happened and why Ocean decided not to release. Hopefully David will be able to shed some light.
Contributions: Vinny Mainolfi, Gamebase64 (Screenshots)
Hi Frank
What about the comment on GB64 that says
“Digital Marketing PD #028”
does that mean that it was on disk 28 of a Public Domain library from ‘Digital Marketing’?
Seems weird that a game that clearly has an Ocean copyright and also has a version commercially released by Cascade would have ended up in a PD library though – maybe it’s a copy / paste error on GB64’s part?
Hi Fever – I suspect that it was accidently put onto a PD compilation (like what happened to a number of early C64 games – like Stix and Anirog Kong).
The author has suggested that a very very small amount were mastered of the Ocean version, so i’m hoping they will be able to dig out their copy they think they might have – so that we can preserve and make some scans.