Possibly one not to get too excited about, but this entry has come about due to a letter which was sent in from Claire Edgeley from Domark about the original game.
The original game missed out rucks and mauls, but Claire had this to say about the reason why… “Though it doesn’t have rucks and mauls it was never intended to. That will come with Rugby II”
Rugby 2?… something to throw people off the scent of two key features missed out, or did Domark really have a sequel planned for the following year?
At the moment it is purely speculation that such a conversion ever existed, but who knows?… maybe you know more?
We have been informed that a sequel did indeed appear in 1993 on the Amiga and ST, called International Rugby Challenge.. which was awful (Scoring 2% in one Amiga magazine). It DID apparently have Rucks and Mauls too. No doubt this was a planned C64 release, but probably was cancelled when Domark left the C64 market in around 1992.
So are we looking at a conversion attempt, or just a distant plan? Carleton Hadley manages to put this one to rest by saying:
“For shame I did do the original Rugby: The World Cup but there was never any intention to do a sequel. The whole project was a rush job to piggyback on the real rugby world cup which was going on in that year. I think Domark were after the licence but it fell through. We used the above name rather than the official “The Rugby World Cup” and it worked as most reviews treated it as the official game. I think Audiogenic did a much better Rugby game at the same time but it didn’t sell as well as our “official” version!
As you suggest on your website I would think it was PR blurb by Domark to mask the deficiencies of the game we did release. They would have had no intention of releasing a sequel as the hype of the world cup on the TV would have long since passed.”
So there we have it… this indeed was vapourware from both Domark and Commodore Format…
Case closed!…
Contributions: Carleton Hadley
