Our next entry is a bit of a strange mystery overall, flagged up by Martin/Stadium64. Although Skateball appears widely available online, no known original physical copy with this version on tape or disk has ever been found.
GB64 and Lemon64 list Skateball as the US version of Skate Wars – though evidence suggests the game was just released under the title Skate Wars in both regions rather than Skateball. While Skateball was advertised and reviewed (notably in Zzap64 in October 1989) as a C64 title, it seemingly never launched under that name at that time. Instead, it appeared roughly a year later as Skate Wars, which was re-issued on various platforms.
Skateball oddly was released on other systems in the UK like Amstrad, Spectrum, and Atari ST, but likely never officially on the C64 from what we can see. The existing C64 cracks of Skateball that exist (some traced back to the scene group Radwar, who implemented the copy protection) suggest unofficial circulation.
Given the lack of a physical boxed release and missing originals despite UBIsoft’s prominence, the Skateball version of Skate Wars on the C64 may well be a game that wasn’t – in that form at least! We hope to learn more soon – but if you have a physical C64 copy of Skateball (and not Skate Wars), please do get in touch!
Contributions: Martin/Stadium64, Gamebase64
