Originally we didn’t know a great deal about this game, only that it would have been the sequel to the released game and featured more of the other trains from the popular series.
However, news has recently surfaced on the World of Spectrum about the sequel from Clockwize and confirmation of the conversions. Taken directly from the World of Spectrum entry, Dean Hickingbottom recalls…
“Game design and attract mode graphics inspired by the ‘Thomas’ book, ‘The Race’. The ZX game was ported to the Amstrad CPC by Dean Hickingbottom. There are also CBM64 and Atari 8 bit versions. This game was never released due to a dispute between Alternative and Clockwize.”
Alternative had the game mentioned numerous times in Commodore Format, but nothing ever of note, apart from its goings on within its Time Scanner.
So confirmation!… but who was behind the C64 version and did the game really get fully completed?… The note from Dean seems to suggest just that and it was merely a dispute with Alternative that prevented the game from seeing the light of day… Could we therefore be eventually seeing a full version of this game?
We could indeed – the game has been confirmed as being completed and a master disk produced and hopefully in the future it should see the light of day. The inlays were even produced, but sadly Dean doesn’t have any of them. Developer names have been confirmed also!
Great news in the hunt for this long lost game…
Contributions: Andrew Fisher, Peter Weighill, World of Spectrum, Dean Hickingbottom