The collection of earlier versions of Activision/Electric Dreams games seems to be growing, and we have another here with Super Hang-On, which was flagged up on the Lemon64 forums by The Wolf.
Out in the wild are two versions of Super Hang On, both are pretty poor – due to how the developer Darrell Etherington had to pick up someone else’s abandoned work and finish it quickly. However, one of the versions features much larger bikes in the game.
Looking in more detail, the larger bike edition seems slightly unfinished. At the very start, there is no starting metal frame, but crucially there is only one single CPU bike that you see at any one time. The roads in the Africa edition are also red in the large bike version, but yellow in the smaller bike edition.
So what has happened? Well, in Games Machine magazine – they suggest that the C64 edition had been pulled from shelves due to quality issues. One theory is that this was the larger bike edition, and then Darrell made improvements, such as reducing sprites to get more CPU bikes and tweaked the colours etc.
JazzGhostrider feels it might be the other way around, and that large bike version is the improved version. We hope to learn more from Darrell soon to get confirmation.
We weren’t entirely sure how the large bike version got out – if it was released as the disk version, or was an earlier release like with Chiller and its different music. One poster (Nayphee) on the Lemon64 forums suggests that in Australia, there was a budget re-release of the game where the large sprite version was on one side of the disk, and the smaller sprite version on the other. Thankfully, Martin/Stadium64 came to the rescue to confirm:
I have that Aussie budget release, and can confirm that both versions are included. Also tested all my originals of Super Hang-On and posted on Lemon, but give it here as well:
- Electric Dreams – Side A – Map – Africa/Asia – BIG sprites
- Electric Dreams – Side B – Map – America/Europe – BIG sprites
- Ozisoft/HitSquad – Side A – Map – Africa/Asia – BIG sprites
- Ozisoft/HitSquad – Side B – Map – America/Europe – small sprites
- Game Set & Match 2 – Side A – Map – Africa/Asia – small sprites
- Game Set & Match 2 – Side B – Map – America/Europe – small sprites
- Reel Action – does only have Africa/Asia tracks – small sprites
- Identical to Side A of Game Set & Match 2
- Big Box 30 – Side A – Map – Africa/Asia – small sprites
- Big Box 30 – Side B – No map – 2 onefiler America/Europe – small sprites
- Electric Dreams vs Ozisoft/HitSquad: diskettes uses the same kind of copy protection.
- Side A’s – seems identical
So that is how the big sprite version got out, but it is strange how the Disk version just has the large bike version when it could have been released on tape too. Are we seeing a Chiller-type scenario, where one or the other was then later released as a replacement? Does anyone have an original Disk version with the small sprites on just to really mix it up and confuse us more? :)
Even stranger is that the C64 version was never really reviewed at all by anyone at full price (or even budget it seems). If anyone can find a proper C64 full price or budget review, please let us know – it will be interesting to see which version they reviewed.
Our hunch is that the game was reworked into the smaller sprite version as some minor set of improvements, and perhaps would replace the disk version over time. But we’ll wait and hopefully hear from the horse’s mouth about what really happened very soon.
In the meantime, see the bizarre twist with a US version of the game being advertised as late as 1991. Something about Super Hang On and Commodore 64s do not seem to mix very well!
Contributions: The Wolf, JazzGhostrider, Martin/Stadium64
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Game_SuperHangOnV1 (zip)
Gallery
Update history
03/12/24 – Further details from Martin/Stadium64 to confirm about versions released.
