Yet another Hewson title to add to GTW64, thanks to Richard Bayliss for highlighting. This game has actually been around in the C64 archives for some time now, since it was cracked pretty much back in the day.
The good news is that there isn’t anything to find as such, as the full game was released by the cracking scene. But what of the Hewson release itself?
Firstly, a bit about the game… Mad Mission is a very simple split screen shooter and very simplistic alien attack waves (which seem to just repeat non-stop). Graphically it is very simple.
Hewson apparently rejected the game according to their wiki, and it later leaked via a crack label. Lars got in touch via the comments in November 2023, and confirmed that this was his second game that was sent to Hewson around 1987 time. Lars feels that it was Hewson that leaked the game, and as a result it was unsellable to other publishers.
What is interesting is that Lars deliberately removed the last 8 of the 16 stages, to be sure that no-one could fully steal the game. So there could be a later version out there still to find and recover!
Contributions: Richard Bayliss, Lars Sneftrup
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Available downloads
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Update history
21/11/23 – Update added from the programmer.
I developed this as my second game around 1987. It was sent to Hewson, who leaked it, which in turn meant that it was unsellable to other publishers. As a curiosity, I removed the last 8 of the 16 stages to be sure no one stole it. Apparently, they didn’t notice that. So there were 8 stages that was never released to the public.
Thanks very much Lars for the details, and very sorry to hear this. I’ll update the page to reflect this. Does the version with the other 8 stages still exist by any chance?