It has been somewhat of a mystery about Kwik Snax on the C64, which ended up being a completely different game to the ZX Spectrum puzzler of the same name. The ZX Spectrum game was a spruced up Pengo clone, where as the C64 version was a mix of Flicky and Pacman.
Thankfully what we got was pretty decent, though it’s always been a question on our lips about whether perhaps there had been any plans for the original to have been converted.
Well, The Oliver Twins confirmed on their own webpage about the game that there hadn’t been plans to convert Kwik Snax originally to the C64 at all. But then Jason Benham had sent in a maze game to Codemasters, which they decided to re brand with Dizzy, and create a C64 Kwik Snax.
GTW’s Gaz Spence had wondered if perhaps the original maze game had been intended for another publisher. Codemasters had just recently published another of Jason’s games, Pro Boxing Simulator – previously released a few years earlier by Superior Software under the name of By Fair Means … or Foul! Superior had also released another of Jason’s games a few years earlier called The Legend of Sinbad, which had a maze element to it.
Could the game have been originally submitted to Superior Software therefore? We checked in with Superior’s Richard Hanson, who remembered Jason and his released games quite clearly – but doesn’t recall being shown a maze game like Kwik Snax for approval.
That’s not to say that it wasn’t presented to Superior Software. As Richard had so many submissions back then, he couldn’t be 100% certain after all this time.
So it is possible the game was submitted elsewhere, but none-the-less, the game had been submitted to Codemasters in a different guise. It would be very interesting to see how it looked originally minus the reskinning work and discover what the original intentions were.
So for now we name this entry Kwik Snax V1, until we learn of the original title. We’re hoping to hear back from Jason soon (we think we’ve found him!).
Contributions: Gaz Spence, Richard Hanson
