Finally – confirmation that a C64 conversion of Jetpac was in the works from Ultimate. A small news snippet in Commodore User magazine details that the game was being prepared – though of course pretty late compared to the Spectrum/Vic 20 releases, with a release date set for 1984.
The game of course never surfaced, and for years we’ve puzzled why there was no official conversion. However, there was a feeling that a conversion was already out there and the official conversion was in fact this game:
http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=10512&d=18&h=0
Bac Pac is from 1984 and is pretty much a solid conversion of the game – it doesn’t quite fully match the Spectrum version though. So we’re wondering if maybe Ultimate rejected the conversion, or decided that actually the game was a little too old to consider releasing at that stage.
Well, we recently found a news snippet from BigK magazine in 1984, where one of the writers at BigK was sent a copy of Bac Pac it seems (based on the description of the game), thinking originally it was an official conversion from Ultimate. Tim Stamper however confirmed to BigK that the game was unofficial and not sanctioned. It seemed very clear at this stage that Ultimate had no intention of seeing a C64 conversion done.
Unfortunately it is likely that Commodore User got their facts wrong, and maybe they had seen Bac Pac and got excited by the conversion, thinking it was official. It seems that Computer and Video Games magazine also had the same confusion too (see scans).
We’ll keep this entry open until we get concrete evidence that no official conversion was under way.
Contributions: Paul Morrison
There’s another small piece on this in Issue 39 of Computer and Video Games (Page 13). Here’s (hopefully) the link: https://archive.org/details/Computer_Video_Games_Issue_039_1985-01_EMAP_Publishing_GB/page/n11/mode/2up
Thanks Paul, great spot! Just added that now with a credit to yourself.