It was meant to be a nice conversion for the cool budget kings of Flair, Microvalue. Eventually it turned out to be a nightmare for the game’s developer.
Topsy Turvy was being developed for Microvalue back in 1992 by Jed Adams (Who previously had worked on Putty and Fuzzball).
This was a conversion of an Atari ST game where you solved puzzles by flipping up and down from the top and bottom of the screen. Not much else is known about the actual puzzles involved. All we know is that the main character could not jump.
Music is unknown, but it was likely to be either Adam Gilmore or Sean Connolly.
Although completed, Microvalue wanted Jed to add loads of extras which were not in the agreement that Jed had been set to. Once Jed refused to do these extras, Microvalue lost Jed £750.
This was it, and the game was scrapped… no-one else came along and finished the title off. Jed had hoped that a cracker had sneaked it out, as what happened with Space Veg Corp, but sadly it doesn’t seem to be the case.
Jed sadly does not have anything of the game anymore… so it is very unlikely that this game may ever be found. That is, unless someone from Flair may still have something. But this is very unlikely.
So for now, we sit and wait.. and hope that something turns up out of the blue.
A puzzling end for a nifty sounding puzzler…
Contributions: Jed Adams
Supporting content
Creator speaks
Jed Adams talks about work on Topsy Turvey..
"Actually since i'm here anyway .. I could add another game to the missing list...
It was called "Topsy Turvy". It was kind of a wierd puzzle / platform game , where you could flip upside down and walk along the top of the screen and flip back to the bottom of the screen , you couldn't jump only flip.
It was a port of an atari st game of the same name ( not sure if that ever came out either )
It was coded and pixeled by me and was to be published by Microvalue / Flair. They started asking for features not in the original agreement and when I said it would not fit onto the disk they cut me off and stiffed me for the payment a massive 750 pounds.
I wonder if any of the crack / hacker groups have a copy . i've never seen it mentioned at all anywhere."
Jed Adams.
