Games That Weren't^®

Beat’em ups were at an all time high around the early 90’s since the launch of Street Fighter 2 in the arcades. The C64 managed to get in on the mix with a poor conversion. However, other beat’em ups were popping up elsewhere, clearly inspired by the franchise.

Death Blow was one such title which was being developed by demo coder Rob Rawson-Tetley, who is better known as Demi-God, and contributed a lot of demos and bits to Binary Zone PD back in the day.

Clearly the game was never completed, but for reasons as yet unknown. It is possible that Rob may have moved on from the C64 to pastures new, maybe real life got in the way? But the stage the game got to is pretty good and promising so far. There are titles, character selection and level selection screens – though none seem to have any effect just yet in the game. There is one sun set background which looks reasonable, though you cannot actually properly move your players it seems (only being able to kick at this stage).

Is it possible that Rob compiled this up and put it out there, knowing that the game was never going to get finished?

Well, we managed to track down Rob, and he confirmed that the game was never completed. The title was believed to have been started in response to the disappointing Street Fighter 2 conversion, and to prove that a better job could be done.

Rob was 17 when he started coding the game, and it was just done really as a bit of fun. By the time of 1994, he had turned 18 and was working full time, doing a business degree at college and writing business software on PC. Rob commented that developing C64 games by yourself was pretty laborious and time consuming, and in the end he didn’t have the time to fit it in with other commitments. So it was left unfinished and abanoned. Oddly, Rob has no recollection of himself releasing the demo, so he can’t recall how it got leaked!

When asked if any more was ever written, Rob replied that this demo was as far as it got. There is sadly nothing more to show!

So thanks to Rob, we can close the case on this game!

Well, this is another title which has been out there for some time, but as we start going into the previews section in Gamebase, we are now finally starting to pick up some of these early and lost titles.

Allaxmax is a sideways scrolling shooter with some simple 1 char parallax effects, where you control a ball shaped object that can shoot. Unfortunately there are no aliens or anything to shoot at this stage. Oddly there are titles and a planet selection screen in place though. There are a number of different and simple backdrops in place for some of the planets as well.

Apart from some credits, we know little else about this game, who it was meant for and how far it eventually got. Andrew and James didn’t seem to go onto much else on the C64. Andrew is possibly Andy Lumley, who did stuff for Sonic Graffiti and the music player that was used by Ben Hayes and others.

Could James Evans be anything to do with Jim Evans, who did music for Flying Shark on the C64? Do you know anything more about this game?

What we have here is a slick looking Pong style game with bitmap backgrounds, very much like a X-Ample style of game. Stated as coming soon with a wide range of features and additions, B-Ball never did quite make it sadly.

The game has a few twists to the standard Pong theme it seems – where you must try and score extra points by hitting a randomly placed block before your opposition does. The game at this stage seems to have some basic AI and a good chunk of the game does indeed seem to be present. Just things like titles are missing really.

So was this game victim to the dying C64 market, or did the developers have real life get in their way? In 2019, Genesis Project recovered and released the full game – so here it is now (including a new preview) and very much a case closed. Hedning confirms that the game was never sold and it was recovered from development disks.

Case closed!

Not too much really to say about this game at this stage. Was it meant as a joke or a serious title? We suspect that Bad Game was given as a title by the crackers.

The aim is simply to get through the fast sideways scrolling level without hitting too many things. Collisions seem to be turned off though, so there isn’t too much point at this stage to the game at all.

So really this entry is to flag up the game and try and confirm what the plans were for it. No credits as of yet – do you know anything about it?

What seems to be a very promising preview at the start, with a lot of really nice glossy presentation and graphics – when you start this preview, you are pretty much greeted by a static bitmap and some test sprites flying around.

You a ship that you can move up and down from the far right of the screen, but that is it. The indication was that the game was due to be a sort of side-on Galaxian game with different bitmap backgrounds.

Promising it does look – but did it ever get any further than this? At the time CP Verlag may have been winding up on their C64 productions, and this could have been a casulty as a result.

D-Lite have done a number of games on the C64, so we hope to find out soon a bit more about their titles and if any of them ever progressed any further.

Altarius is a promising sideways scrolling SEU, which has a 2 player mode and a wide range of attack waves thrown at you. No backgrounds apart from a star field at this stage though.

You have unlimited lives, and can get to see all the possible enemies that the preview has – before being greeted by a large guardian ship which flies past. The game then gets stuck in an never ending loop.

So where did this game come from, and who was it planned for? Certainly one of the budget labels at the time could have snapped this up, so was it a case of the developers getting cold feet with it?

And who were the developers exactly?

Another title which has had plenty of work on the presentation to feel like it should be more complete, but at this stage there isn’t a huge amount to do.

The game just has you having to avoid balls that are falling from the sky – but there is no real interaction at this stage, just a lot of effort made it seems on the graphics.

Did the game get any further than this? Was it meant for any company in particular? We have the developer’s names listed, so we hope to find out from them very soon what exactly was planned for this game.

Note – the game is not the same as the 1990 Cosmos release.

A promising start of a sort of expanded Connect 4 game – where you must get 5 coloured tiles in a row – taking turns between two players to plot your move.

The game preview kicks straight into a 2 player game, and once you get 5 in a row – that is it, demo over.

At this stage, the game looks pretty promosing – some nice graphics in the game – and overall this could have made a nice budget title. The C64 was just about going in 1993 still commercially. So what happened to it?

At this stage we had no coder credits, but tucked away in the code was “(c) Brian/Graffity”, who was a prolific coder, musician around 1990 onwards and is still semi-active at the moment. So we hope to find out more about this game soon!

Ok, so i’m a little confused with our next title. Cheeky Twins 3 is of course the third game from a trilogy that never was. The game as you might expect should have a cute theme to it, with the previous two titles being a single screen platformer and a bomberman clone respectively.

However, this is a sideways scrolling shooter – which doesn’t seem to have much of a tie to the series apart from the title screen.

But it is a good sideways scrolling preview though – a promising one with some good visuals. There is one level in total, before it continuously scrolls forever.

So how does it relate to the other games? We’re not sure just yet, but hope that Jan Krolzig can tell us more. But also shed light about what happened to the game? Did real life commitments get in the way in the end?

Do you know any more about this game?

I like City Invaders – it is a neat sort of Pooyan clone with a cool main character who pops their head in and out of building windows trying to stop the city invaders.

There isn’t too much to the preview just yet, but its a good indication of a fun little budget title that was due for release by CP Verlag.

So what happened to the title? CP Verlag were still going strong at the time, so we believe that it was real life commitments that got in the way or a platform upgrade.

Do you know any more about this game?