Another former Cascade member started coding on a little game, which should have been a conversion of the Amiga game “Reel Fishing” a long time back. However, when a unofficial crack of ‘Turrican 3’ happened, this project was put on ice.
But once the dust settled, the game was brought back to life and in production for Protovision (Who produce new C64 software in 2000 and onwards). Progress seemingly was looking very good and the game shaping up well.
However, after some badness on the C64 scene, the developer became disillusioned and decided to quit developing on the C64. You can read more about this in the note which is supplied with this preview:
More details on C64-wiki.de states:
“Markus Spiering aka Courage – known a bit for his funny Turrican vs. Clyde Intros in the Diskmag Metal Force – developed his first game title, Tanks 3000 for Protovision. This is a new edition of the classic game tank with support for 4 players. At the same time, he began a C64 implementation of the Amiga game Reel Fishing, an economic simulation around fishing. Although the project looked excellent and made good progress – graphic artist Johan Janssen aka JSL was very productive for this game – he stopped the development, as he got very negative feedback on Tanks 3000 and, as usual, a “crack” was immediately released.”
Everything you see here is pretty much what was left over when cancelled. There are probably bits and pieces of code, graphics and music unused which could be seen in the future, but we are assuming this is almost 100% of what was left.
The developer decided to release all his work on the game out into the open so that the game gets some kind of recognition and reception rather than gather dust. It’s possible that maybe someone will offer to pick up the pieces of this game, but otherwise the developer states that the game will never be finished.
What with the decision to release, GTW has added the title to its archives and hopes to pay homage to a title which looked as if it could have been rather nice. The preview shows very good promise of a fantastic conversion, with a playable area similar to that of the ship sailing in Pirates. Some nice graphics are present throughout (although its stated that some are borrowed temporarily for the preview).
Additionally, Glenn Rune Gallefoss has kindly submitted to GTW all his SFX work which was mostly unused. This can be downloaded from the link above. And Marco has also submitted some previously unseen graphics which are in Amica format and are now part of the overall download and in the screenshots section.
Sometime ago, Markus Spiering got in touch to confirm that he had decided to continue working on the project, and still works on it from time to time. We had originally set the entry to “Private”, but accidently set back again after forgetting our conversation with Markus. We’ve now just added this note to say that the project is currently ongoing and its hoped that it will eventually escape the GTW archives. Markus has mentioned that progress has been slow, but steady – fingers crossed!
Contributions: Zeldin, Glenn Rune Gallefoss, Marco, Peter Sanden, Anonymous Contributor, Markus Spiering
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Sfx_Reelfishing.zip (zip)
- Preview_Reelfishing.zip (zip)
Gallery
Update history
- 05/08/26 – Reason for game being set to private and what the current status is all added! Good news :)
- 20/07/26 – Game was set to private for some reason, now fixed!
