Yet another unreleased Codemasters game! … but this time from early on in their life in 1987.
Phantomas was to be a conversion of the released spectrum game where you control a robber in a Manic Miner/Dizzy kind of game.
The conversion was being completed by Mark Greenshields, who previously developed the excellent Split Personalities, and worked on the mixed recieved 19 Boot Camp.
According to Darren Melbourne, the conversion was very faithful, and was actually completed! So why did Codemasters choose not to release this faithful conversion? Bizzarely Darren says the finger points to the fact that it was too much of an exact Spectrum clone, without any upgrades to take advantage of the C64 hardware. For this reason it was canned.
Yes… one word springs to mind… Dizzy… but alas… this was seen differently.
Mark suggested that he wasn’t paid for the work, so never got the final game. It’s believed that the original game didn’t sell very well and for that reason Codemasters decided to ditch the game.
Can this ever be found for GTW? Mark offers hope that he may still have it, but its unlikely. Time will tell!
Contributions: Darren Melbourne, Mark Greenshields
Supporting content
Gallery
Creator speaks
Mark Greenshields talks about work on Phantomas:
“Phantomas never happened on the C64 as Codemasters did not pay me for the code so never got the final game. I think the original did not sell too well so they didn’t publish the C64”
I’d love to see this game. Fingers crossed it appears soon :-)