A short entry for a Commodore MAX title that was proposed, but never finished and released. Spiders From Mars was eventually released on the Commodore VIC 20 and was a sort of Defender style game.
Spiders Of Mars for Max was actually completed and handed off for evaluation on Aug 20, 1982, and Greenhouse was handed off for evaluation a few weeks later, but neither game showed up for the Max launch in Japan.
In July 2026, Bugjam highlighted a Commodore MAX promotional leaflet, featured in 8-Bit Show and Tell’s excellent video on the system, which suggests that Commodore had been preparing to launch the MAX in Western markets as well as Japan. Interestingly, the leaflet lists Spiders Of Mars (note the “Of” spelling) amongst the proposed launch titles, alongside Home Babysitter and Math Teacher.
However, the screenshots shown in the leaflet appear to be mock-ups rather than actual in-game images, so unfortunately they don’t provide any clues as to what the MAX version may have looked like. The leaflet does, however, further reinforce that Spiders From Mars was intended to form part of Commodore’s planned software line-up.
If you know anything more about the MAX conversion, or perhaps have a surviving prototype, please do get in touch!
Contributions: Kate Willaert, Archive.org, Bugjam
Through an extensive video covering the Commodore Max Machine by 8bit Show and Tell ( https://youtu.be/NBYZeLO7rA0?si=ZwTe8FbclB-MPuU1 ) I learned to my surprise that the downsized C64 released as Max Machine in Japan was also very close to release on Western markets, with Commodore USA already having a complete info leaflet ready:
https://archive.org/details/commodore-max-machine/?
This flyer also mentions Spiders of (sic!) Mars for the release lineup of games – unfortunately the “screenshots” are all fake, so we still don’t know what it looked like on an actual screen. And it mentions Home Babysitter, which seems to have been released for the VIC20 only, and an educational title called Math Teacher.
By the way, I think it would be helpful to include the previous page of that internal document in the Gallery here, to get a more complete picture.
That’s brilliant, thanks for flagging up Bugjam! Updated the page with links and also added some extra scans too.