Games That Weren't^®

A very quick entry for a surprise title which we never knew about until reading a snippet in ACE magazine about “Costly Games That Never Made it”.

In that list was a game called Reach For The Moon, which apparently had a 5 or 6 figure sum written off by Rainbird around 86/87 time when the plug was pulled. The game was a mega-project apparently commissioned from ODE (Oxford Digital Enterprises – thanks Merman!)

According to the article, the project may well have been the most expensive software cancellation so far (back in 1987 at least!).

We’re not quite sure what the game was – but the end of the article suggested that it was a Space Shuttle based game of some kind. See the comments thanks to Max, but it seems the game was actually developed by Magnetic Scrolls. A coder admits to being part of the Spectrum game – may have even been finished according to the person only known as “Deep Fried Geekboy”

According to Spanish Sinclair magazine Microhobby, March 1986 issue, page 4, the game was an Apollo programme simulation (not Space Shuttle) and was to be published by Rainbird:

“ODE is also working on a sophisticated simulation program for the Apollo landing on the lunar surface, which will be called “Reach for the moon”, which will be launched on the market next summer by Rainbird Software.”

Richard Horrocks got in touch and suggested that the game was well under way when he started at ODE. It has been suggested that David Pringle, Gareth Blower and Rik Yapp may know more about the game.

The game was dropped not long after Richard had started, with the entire team moving onto a new Trivial Pursuit game. Richard was an Amstrad CPC programmer at the company, before moving onto the Amiga.

The game did surface in some shape or form, with parts used in later games. One part in particular was the office scene used in “Yes, Prime Minister”. This was actually from an interactive office scene for the head of NASA in the game that was never used. Does that mean that Dermot Quin was the developer perhaps?

One theory by Anonymous Contributor is that the game Apollo 18, also a simulation game, beat them to it, both being 1987 games. Richard Hewison has also confirmed that the game was cancelled, and we hope to learn more details about its development in the future from Richard.

Do you know anything more about this game?

T-Runner was described by its preview snippet in ACE magazine (issue 4) as being a Marble Madness-type arcade adventure, set on a Marines training platform in space.

After 300 years of lying idle, the central computer has gone haywire and its all up to you to sort it out…. Well, it would have been had the game actually been released. The Christmas 1987 release date didn’t quite happen!

It seems that unfortunately this Nexus Productions game got caught up in the folding of the company at the end of 1987 … meaning that we would never get to see this promising sounding game.

Unfortunately no other company picked up the game from the remains of Nexus, and so the mystery of the game lives on.

We do not yet know who the developers were behind the game – quite possibly it could have been Paul Voysey or Tayo Olowu. Hopefully they may come forward and shed some light.

Xecutor is a pretty good vertical scrolling shooter which was released by ACE software (a sub company of The Edge) on the ZX Spectrum towards the end of 1987.

The game was planned for release on the C64 just a month later – but never surfaced, and so another entry gets added to GTW64.

Clearly from the advert and also ACE magazine review, you can spot the C64 mention in the list of formats.

So what happened? At the moment, we do not know – and there seems to be no other mention of a C64 version anywhere apart from the ACE spectrum review and the advert itself.

Do you know any more about this lost conversion?

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?

Agrophobia was a text adventure game written by Mark Healey (who did graphics for Sleepwalker and the Fun School series).

The game was created whilst at school, and Mark sold about 3-4 copies to friends. It was likely his very first game sold to other people.

This is all we currently know about the game – and we’re not sure if Mark coded it from scratch or used something like the Graphic Adventure Creator tool.

It is also likely that the game may never be found and preserved, but this entry is created for posterity. If you were one of those 3-4 who brought the game and still have it, please contact us!

Andrew Challis is somewhat a bit of a C64 legend, being the coder of two particular games I grew up with and enjoyed a lot (Into The Eagle’s Nest and Trollie Wallie) and also produced some cool loader systems for Interceptor (including Micro Painter loader game for Players).

His very last C64 release shouldn’t have been Into The Eagle’s Nest, but in fact a game called Satar for the same company Pandora.

We know very little about the game just yet, but it was believed to have been a space shoot’em up with adventure elements to it.

For reasons currently unknown, it was never released – and was shelved. Andrew then moved onto pastures new and no more was seen by Andrew on the C64. Andrew decided to take a break from coding after 5 years or so, and left Interceptor to work for BT. The game then shortly afterwards lost momentum and others moved onto new projects. Apparently the game was previewed at a 1986/87 computer exhibition.

We are hoping to find out more about the game very soon, including if anything of its development ever survived (design docs, early demo builds etc). Sadly Andrew has confirmed that he no longer has anything regarding the game, so we hope to find Robin Chapman to see if by chance he kept anything.