Hill 19 was to be a strategic action-shooter game, very similar to Ikari Warriors/Commando, but with more strategy involved. The player would control a team of characters (believed to be about 3), including Radio and Gunner.
You would move turn-based through a vertically scrolling environment (progressing “up the hill”), with foxholes, trenches and terrain that would offer cover and tactical options. Each person would also have a special ability. For example, the Radio Operator could call in airstrikes or medics.
Compared to the team’s previous game, Blood Valley (which was a conversion of the ZX Spectrum game), the game would take full advantage of the C64’s hardware, with a multiplexor and software sprites used to increase on-screen objects.
Che Guevara John recalls that the development got quite far, though with the success of Ocean’s Platoon, Gremlin decided to pivot towards a more story-driven, multi-load and multi-part gameplay format. Development was reassigned and Hill 19 would be scrapped to make way for Butcher Hill instead.
That wasn’t the end for Hill 19 though. Martin Hooley still had confidence in the project, and it was decided to repurpose the game into a new title. Che suggested the name of “Shell Shock”.
The game was continued in-house at Imagitec Design for a few months or so, though it isn’t known at this stage how much work was added and how much further the game progressed. Lance and Che decided though to leave before the game was finished and Lightsource Productions was set up, renting an office just down the road from Imagitec (where they kept a good relationship with the studio).
Sadly, development was cancelled – but we’re not yet sure why, and will update this page once we have more details from Che. The first we heard of the development was when Che posted about the games and needed assistance backing up some disks.
Games That Weren’t offered to do this, and we backed up three disks – two with “Hill 19” labelled and another with “Shell Shock”. Unfortunately, only some editor code and graphics were present on all the disks, with no actual game code.
Development had been done partly via using a cross compiler between an Atari ST and C64, and it seems the game’s missing code will be in an ST format that would have been ported down a cable, and which Che unfortunately doesn’t have. Hopefully in the future, the ST disks with remains of the game can be recovered – so watch this space!
Che is pretty sure that Ben Daglish did some original tunes for Hill 19/Shell Shock, but these too were not on the disks. It is plausible that Ben’s music was what ended up in Butcher Hill – but it would be amazing if there was an original composition yet to find that hasn’t been heard before.
However, in the meantime – we have extracted some graphics from the disks after getting the editor compiling and loading in some of the scenes. Along with some sprites, this is the very first glimpse of the game visually in our gallery, as no screens were shown in the press. Hopefully very soon we’ll get to add something that you can play!
Contributions: Che Guevara John
