Yet another Edge title. The game was advertised in magazines such as CVG in 1986, and was brought to GTW’s attention thanks to Lee Theasby who kindly provided the advert scan. The game was an adventure RPG which was in the same style as the Gargoyle games from the looks of things.
The game saw a release primarily on the Spectrum platform (See WOS at http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0003975), but typically the C64 version never surfaced as promised.
A recent contributor had found that in Soft, #5, September/October 1987, pg. 8, there was news that this Spectrum-game from 1986 was said to be converted to the Commodore in 1987. Well that was the plan at least.
Pennsoft (British converting team – mispelt as Pennysoft) said that the game should have been ready in August/September 1987 but the team had some problems, which delayed the release. Furthermore, if those problems weren’t solved, the public had to wait until November or the beginning of December 1987 to see the Commodore-version. Sadly, nothing more was ever heard.
It is very likely that Pennsoft could have been converting straight from z80 code, and hence had speed issues which were hard to solve. We need to find these Pennsoft guys and find out more about what happened… but its a big lead and hopefully it will lead us to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow (If it is gold that is…).
Thanks to Professor Chaos – he made the correction that Pennysoft was infact Pennsoft, and this has led to some possible leads to try and learn more about the C64 development, especially via Andrew Wright. So watch this space!
Contributions: Lee Theasby, Anders, Professor Chaos
“Pennysoft” must be a misspell from Soft magazine. They clearly meant “Pennsoft” without “y”. I’ve looked them up last September, noted a lot down, and here is it all:
Pennsoft is credited in:
C64:
– Triaxos (uncredited music by Antony Crowther)
ZX Spectrum:
– Aliens (from Software Studios)
– Fairlight: A Prelude (only 128K version)
– Prohibition (from Infogrames)
– Triaxos
– Warlock
Amstrad CPC:
– Aliens (from Software Studios)
– Fairlight: A Prelude
– Fairlight: Trail of Darkness
– Mindstone
– Triaxos
Does that fourth CPC title sound familiar? ;) After unpacking, it has a hidden credit: “Graham Bosworth for Pennsoft”, and so has “Fairlight: A Prelude”, also on CPC: “GAME: ANDY WRIGHT”, “SOUND: CHRIS SHARMA”.
The aforementioned “Dr. Andrew J. A. Wright” is on https://www.worldofsam.org/people/andy-wright and https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-wright-4150bb23/
I didn’t find more (back then) and never tried to contact anybody, but maybe it leads *you* to gold :)
That is fantastic work Professor Chaos! Thank you so much! Just updating the page now and will ping Andrew a message to see if we can learn more!