Flimbos Quest 2

System 3

Status: No Download, Findability: 1/5

After a fairly successful introduction, Flimbo was to be given another roll in his very own sequel called “Flimbo’s Quest 2”. The first mention of the sequel was actually in the end sequence of the first game.

This was to be a five level game with massive maps including beautiful parallax scrolling, graphics, animation and game play, improving much further over the original. The parallax scrolling was to be ditched, so the game could cope with sloped platforms. It was more of the same, but to be far more improved compared to the original game.

The Dutch developers of the sequel as well as the original, Laurens van de Donk and Arthur van Jole were still waiting to be paid by System 3 for the first game. Originally according to speculation, it was rumoured they both decided to halt work on the sequel after non-payment of the first game, and so Flimbo 2 was shelved. Actually, Arthur confirms its close, but in fact they were only offered about £1500 to do the game, and so it was cancelled.

Arther did level graphics only, but sadly these have been long lost. Only Laurens or someone else *might* have it tucked away somewhere… or something at least… but its not all lost…

Music was created and completed by none other than Reyn Ouwehand, and it is recently thanks to the guys at High Voltage Sid Collection in Christmas 2009 that we have got chance to listen to the tunes (See link at top now). Sadly there was no preview present with the tunes :-(

Thanks to iAN CooG for also supplying GTW with the correct SID file for the game (Which just has the one tune, compared to the initial release which incorrectly had more tunes). The original music demos were added in December 2015

Currently there sits a unfinished game in a playable stage, which GTW may possibly get some screenshots of and hopefully some exciting news one day… who knows. Sadly its not been good so far, Checks have been made to find the disks with the remains of the game, but sadly nothing has been found yet. Will anyone find anything?… We honestly don’t know… This could sadly be
lost forever… :(

Flimbo unfortunately lost this quest…

Contributions: Jazzcat, Arthur Van Jole, iAN CooG/HVSC, Fabrizio Bartoloni

Supporting content

Available downloads

Creator speaks

Arthur Van Jole speaks about work on Flimbos Quest 2…

“There have been 2 games that we worked on with the working title “Flimbo’s Quest 2”. One is the 64 version, a platformer, and the second is indeed a SNES version, more of a 3D-isometric action-adventure ( like Zelda on the SNES).

Let me start with the 64 version. This was supposed to improve on FQ1 in the playability area, not so much the graphic area. We dumped the parallax-scroll so we could use the full character-set for sloped platforms. I mainly worked on the graphics for three months, only level-work, and Laurens was busy trying to find a publisher for the game. As the 64-market had already crashed he came to me with the message that we could get 1500 pounds for the game, as an absolute maximum. Time wasted. Project canceled. I’m afraid I haven’t got any of the materials I worked on, and I think I was the only who did have it, so no screenshot or anything. Bummer. And those floppies wouldn’t have survived the past 12 or 13 years anyway.

On the money-side for FQ1, just for fun : Mark Cale (director of business at System3 at that time) found it NOT necessary to pay employees or pay off to contracts because his main priority was to drive around in VERY expensive hired cars like a Beamer 5 series or a Ferrari. We were still expecting to be paid about 8000 pounds in royalties (we had kept track of sales). After receiving many “ordered not to pay” cheques from mr. Cale, Laurens went to one of the many consumer electronics shows in England with a blown up version (about 1meter long and half as high) of one of those non-covered-cheques and immediately found Mark Cale able to buy us out of our contract for 2000 pounds. Better 2000 then nothing.

On the SNES version, if you’re interested : we had a technical guy sort of built us our own SNES emulator in an egg-box (yes, a single board in an egg-box). Hook the Amiga up to the emulator and we could test graphics and code. Only cost us 250 guilders. Brilliant!!!
The game was going to be based on a story which would take you at least 50 hours to complete, with a weird mix of cyber-punk-adventurism, old-skool-hack’n’slash-antics and puzzles. The “real-world” was going to be 3D-isometric, the computer-world would use the special manipulation-plane on the SNES which would allow you to more or less simulate a 3D environment. Everything was still hand-pixeled in a 32 or 64 color-pallette, I don’t remember exactly. I was working on the story mainly when I found out that we had overshot on our experience. We’d only made relatively small games and this, frankly, was way over our head. After some maps were implemented, and Hein Holt had drawn a lot of concept maps, and I was nearly done with the main character, we canceled the project : Euphoria had run out of money. Shame, because in my humble opinion, this would have been a very nice action-adventure with a compelling story.”

Arthur Van Jole.

Update history

20/12/15 – Added real C64 demos of tunes.

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