Games That Weren't 64^®

An interesting title which has been flagged up by Mikael Lundvall. This was to be the last game produced by Swedish company Greve Graphics and was going to be released in 1987, but surprise surprise it never happened!

Details on Wikipedia regarding Greve Graphics state that the game was “Only 5 copies but not complet (sic)” …. so 5 originals were produced and distributed out … but the game was never officially released.

Mikael very kindly translated details which were published in a swedish article which explains more about the game:

“During 1987 the company (Greve Graphics) developed a game called Goremium. Before the planned release 5 original disks were produced, but the game was never officially released.

Two players could play the game simultaneously. The aim of the game is to defeat Rinevald and his evil sons, each having their own evil power, Dirvania (fire), Jilvod (water) and Transvaj (earth). After that, the players face a giant dragon in order to save their princess. The players control a space ship each. Throughout the game the ships can be expanded.

The players can also connect their ships to, by joint effort, become more powerful. The game used the, at the time, new “double scroll” technique to give the game more dimensions. The border was also being fully used to maximize the game area. 48 sprites were used at the same time, and the giant dragon, the final boss, consisted of 13 sprites.

The space ships can, if fully expanded, consist of 13 sprites. The game was planned to be released in the USA during July of 1987, and then in Scandinavia in September of 1987. The game was not to be distributed by American Action or any other Swedish company. The price was going to be 249 SEK, for both the tape and disk versions. This was the last game by Greve Graphics but it was never released. The people behind the game later on moved on to work for other computer companies in Sweden, among others as programming software for the PC.”

This is all that is currently known about the game at present, but it did say in the article about references that Swedish magazine Datormagazin referred to it as “Gorminum” in some article but it didn’t say in what issue or if there were pictures or anything. Do you know which issue it might have been?

According to GiantBomb.com: “GG spent a lot of money and time on the game “Goreemium – The Rise of Nothingness”. It was never released, but several playable demos has been around on trade shows with many people stating “looking extremely innovative” (it was among the first games in the world were user directed a team with different skills to solve complex tasks)”

A translated article here suggests that the game could et will be completed and Lars HÁ¥rd said the following about the game itself to give some more info about what it was like:

“Yes, we worked on Goremium quite a lot in 1987. It’s a two player game with quite heavy AI requirements, which is unusual for a C64 game. It’s basically a space shooter where the players can upgrade their ships and rebuild them in order to make them more powerful. The game was very graphics heavy, giving us 48 simultaneous on-screen sprites, but the main idea was to use advanced AI to enable automated team handling. Unfortunately, Goremium never got completed, and by that time we’d grown tired of the game industry.”

Lars is open to the possibility that some day the C64 game could be resurrected and released – suggesting that they may still have the actual C64 work. Watch this space perhaps!

Contributions: Mikael Lundvall, Alex Ross, Fabrizio Bartoloni