Smurfs is a game which was the creation of a then 15yr old Carl Muller, and was pitched to various companies, such as US Gold, Melbourne House and Firebird.
Sadly US Gold and Firebird rejected Carl, but Melbourne House eventually told Carl to go to University first, but didn’t publish this little platformer.
The game is based loosly on Smurf Rescue from the Atari, and contains some quite simple but effective graphics. The gameplay is quite hard and certainaly a challange.
The game did get a brief bit of shelf life when it was sold in a local bookshop in New Zealand, but that was it. Really it was a game shared between friends and never made the full commercial release as it could have.
Not quite a spectacular game, but from a talented young 15yr old, it was the first steps to programming full time.
A rejected game, which wasn’t that bad… Case closed!
Contributions: Carl Muller
Supporting content
Available downloads
Gallery
Creator speaks
Carl Muller speaks to GTW about work on Smurfs...
"I wrote this when I was 15, and thought it was too long/good (hah!) for a magazine, so I sent them to a company in Auckland. I also made up a couple of tapes each which were sold in my local bookshop (Thelma's bookshop in Waitara, NZ).
The company (Barrie Barnes of Metron Holdings Ltd.) sent them to "Simone" at US Gold/Centresoft around 4 Oct 1985. These were rejected; I presume now for (1) not having the right license in the first case (a bit importantconsidering how popular the Smurfs TV series was and is), (2) Having programmer graphics - it certainly did them no favours! I really can't draw... (3) Limited useability and gameplay polish.
Alas, there was no games industry in New Zealand, but there was a local C64 users group where we shared ideas. The friends of the family who had a C64 loved playing Smurfs though.
They are both completely written in machine code.
I also submitted my various software to British Telecom (Firebird Software) and was turned down by Tony Beckwith (Mirrorsoft/Probe/Climax) on 19 Sep 1986.
I wrote to Beam software/Melbourne House, getting a reply on 17 Nov 1986, and they said to go to university as planned, so I did, and then went to work for them."
Carl Muller.
This on the Coleco Vision was one of my fave games in the early 80s. This was a classic title on other platforms.