Games That Weren't 64^®

Police Quest was the first of a trilogy written by former officer Jim Walls. It centered on you controlling Officer Sonny Bonds who had to solve various murders and drug cases. This was a favourite on the Amiga and it was a surprise to hear of a C64 version. German magazine ASM reviewed the C64 version of Police Quest. Thanks to Amy, a partical translation has been recieved – they didn’t like the graphics and it seemed they didn’t like it at all and gave it a -1.

Timo Weirich supplies the scan:

And recently gave us the full translation:

"The life of a cop in the land of opportunity is pretty hard, at least in the case when one plays POLICE QUEST by SIERRA on the C-64. That might not least be due to the rather bad graphics and (the fact) that one can hardly recognize a policeman. The sprite of our hero is so poorly designed that one must doubt of the graphic artist’s skills. Fortunately, the game still plays excellent, so that I also want to recommend this game warmly to the 64ers. It gets a deduction of points nevertheless, sorry SIERRA."

However, nothing has been seen of this game in the UK so did ASM review an incomplete game? Personally, I heard nothing of a C64 version until seeing this article. None of their other popular graphic adventure franchises Kings Quest and Space Quest made it to the machine.

Thanks to Aristides Castiglioni, both Al Lowe and Jim Walls (The creators of the game) were quizzed about the existance of a C64 conversion, and it was news to them. It seems that Sierra only planned for a C64 conversion, so maybe the ASM reviewed version was an unofficial conversion?

We hope to find out more from ASM to what code they reviewed and seeing what might still exist. This could well be vapourware i’m afraid…

Do you know anymore about this game?…

Contributions: Amy Madsen, Aristides Castiglioni, Timo Weirich

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