No we’re not mad – but it seems that Elite had planned 3 Thundercats games to be released in 1988. The first in the series was Gargoyle Games’ Thundercats – The Lost Eye of Thundera. The second eventually turned into Beyond The Ice Palace, and which you can read more about here.
Issue 3 of ACE magazine confirmed that there were 3 versions in production – one version being produced in house at Elite (thought to be this 3rd part) and another version which was outsourced (and now known to be Nick and Dave’s game) – thought to be the second game in the series. See scan below.
We do not really know anything about the 3rd game sadly – as Elite were keeping it all very hush hush. However, we believe that the Mark Cooksey tune produced and used in Bombjack 2 was actually intended for the game being done in house. Mark sheds a little bit of light on what he knows.
We now hope to find out more from Steve Wilcox himself and see what he can recall and who was doing the 3rd game. Was it Neil A Bate and Chris Harvey?
Contributions: Mark Cooksey
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Creator speaks
Mark Cooksey talks about his Thundercats composition:
“A Thundercats game was developed by Elite and I started working on the theme tune which was a “pig” to do using the very basic music routine. Also I found the tune a bit difficult to translate to the c64. It was decided that Rob Hubbard would do the music for this game.. if you listen to the sound track on youtube it is not the thundercats theme but a catchy rob hubbard original composition.
I think it was decided to use the thundercats theme on Bombjack 2 to save wasting the work that had been done on it. In those days copyright wasn’t considered a problem since the law covering it was at best ambiguous with regards to computer games. However Lionel Bart did successfully sue Elite systems for the use of the music “Consider Yourself” (from Oliver!) in the game Kokotoni Wilf.”
Yeah – remember reading that there were going to be three version and thought it was an idiotic thing to do!