Games That Weren't 64^®

Paddle Mania was an arcade tennis game which was mentioned as being a title for conversion in Commodore User, September 1988 by French software company FIL. UK representatives of FIL were The Sales Curve – but although Silkworm and Ninja Warriors made it and this didn’t.

FIL later lost funding, so its possible that Sales Curve went their own way and decided not to go ahead. This was the last we knew about the game. According to The Games Machine, Paddle Mania was to be released as part of a double pack, with Nikki The Radical Ninja, rather than a stand alone release – so we’re not sure if that was true or not.

However, in 2011 after C64.com converted some disks for Darren Melbourne – we found a music demo which had a huge set of tunes by David Whittaker – and quite good ones too! We made some recordings of a few of the key tunes and passed these over to Darren to check. He confirmed that the tunes were for the Paddle Mania conversion.

We were informed that Paddle Mania was written by Mark Greenshields under contract for Pantheon Software, but Mark didn’t think he worked on the game, which led to a bit of confusion. The graphics were believed to have been done by Sam Mohibull.

As for the game, it was a sort of Table Tennis game meets Speedball. According to Darren, the game was axed for reasons unknown and entire resource was moved onto Continental Circus instead (possibly because Paddle Mania bombed in the arcades).

After checking out a disk with some graphics on, the late Jason Kelk discovered some SNK labelled images – which Darren later confirmed as being graphics from Paddle Mania. Likely done by Ned Langman though. We added the screens in the gallery, but also a download of the source files for you to take a look at yourselves.

Then in early 2025, Games That Weren’t was tasked with converting an entire suitcase of C64 floppy disks for Mark Greenshields. Within the set was a disk labelled Paddle Mania preview, with Mark Greenshield’s signature on it – confirming that Mark had indeed worked on the conversion.

Thankfully, the disk still read – and we were stunned to find a preview of the game which was actually quite advanced and playable. David’s music sadly wasn’t integrated at this stage, but it didn’t seem too far away from a point of being able to have the music added. There are some nice titles and animations too – which we assume were by Ned Langman.

It is a fantastic recovery after the initial music and screens recovery from 2011. We think this is likely all that remains of the game, but its far more than we ever expected. Hopefully in the future we’ll learn more from Darren and Mark about the game. For now, enjoy!

Contributions: Rob Whitaker, C64.com, Darren Melbourne, Mark Greenshields, Jason Kelk, Ross Sillifant, Fabrizio Bartoloni

Supporting content

• Downloads
• Gallery
• Creator speaks
• History

Available downloads

• Preview_PaddleMania (zip)
• Music_PaddleMania (zip)
• Sources_Paddlemania (zip)

Gallery

Creator speaks

Ned recalls about work on Paddle Mania:

“Haha, Paddle Mania, wow that takes me back. They had me holed up in some flat in Croydon doing that when I was about 18. I have a vague memory that it might have been Imagitech? Not sure. I remember going up to Sheffield with Darren to see their offices around about that time. Sorry I can’t be more helpful!”

Update history

• 08/04/25 – Added music demo
• 03/06/16 – Details about double pack added thanks to Ross Sillifant