Games That Weren't^®

As we draw to the end of the games, i’m left with yet another puzzler.

The aim is to turn all the white squares (ON) to yellow squares (OFF). If you click on a selected square (regardless of if it is ON or OFF), all the 4 adjacent squares on each side of it swap states (ON turn to OFF and vice versa).

The square you clicked on remains as it was before the click. Once all squares on the screen are turned off within the set number of moves (given at the bottom), you progress to the next level. If you don’t turn ’em all off before using up all your moves, it’s game over!

Gaz Spence confirms in 2015 that the game was fully released by Chimera designs in 1993 … http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=8854&d=18&h=0

However, the developer Balázs Vilhelm got in touch via the comments to say that the game wasn’t actually fully released or sold. He reveals that he wrote the game in 1993, as a beginner in assembly language. It was planned to be sold through Mr. Wax/Chromance – though he would have been happy for it to be just released on a disk magazine. After a while, communications stopped and then no more was heard about the game and it was never sold.

Balázs is glad that a little slice of his past can still be found online, and that he has left a small memory behind in the C64 world.

Case closed!

Ok ok, yes we know that Zamzara was infact released, but light was shed recently on a rather different game which was shaping up originally by Jukka Tapanimaki. I really love this game, first played on Commodore Format’s powerpack 9… The music, graphics, gameplay is awesome and holds fond memories from my gaming childhood. This would most likely be at least in my top 20 games.

Zamzara was originally going to be very “Impossible Mission” like, with the aim to collect Genes and built DNA. Hewson loved what they were seeing, but thought that the game was way too complex for people to play. As a result, Jukka reprogrammed the game from scratch and it became very adventure like. Hewson took another look at the game and felt that it was now a bit boring.

Following these final comments, Jukka dumbed it right down into a simple shoot-em-up, which Hewson eventually gave the thumbs up to. According to sources, they still said it didn’t have enough content, so Jukka added extra content to create the fantastic game that was eventually released.

But it asks the intriguing question about what happened to these other previews of the game, which played rather differently to the final version. It will be very interesting to see other versions of this game for us to check out. TNT/beyond force from the Lemon forums first brought to light about other versions of Zamzara, and we have quoted most of what he has said about the versions here.

In late December 2015, we added an updated version which now includes music to try and round off and complete the original early version of the game. Worth checking out, and you can now find this version under downloads, thanks to Esa Lyttinen!

He has also put out an earlier version of the game with rather different graphics, which you can download and check out. As you will see from the screenshots, there is a loading screen which Jukka originally did himself which was unused and later re-done by a well known loading screen artist. Recently some of the game’s code has been recovered thanks to a currently unknown preservationist – along with a demo showing a space ship feature which was not used in the game. The various demos added also shows a map feature which was not used in the final game.

It is possible that the game went straight onto the Rack-IT label after the the comment of “Not enough content” from Hewson… which is very sad, as the game is truly awesome, and one sorely missed on the C64DTV.

We are hoping to find more on this title, but sadly Jukka passed away in recent times. We don’t know much more than this, but it is a huge shame that a wonderful talent from the C64’s history has gone. Zamzara being a personal favorite game of mine brings much respect from myself to Jukka, and it is a huge shame that we will not get the chance to hear from him about his work.

We hope that in the future we will be able to host more of his lost/early work as a tribute..

NOTE: This game is (c) Hanna Barbera, and is distributed freely without any profit as part of a digital preservation project. With thanks to David A Palmer productions (http://www.gamesproducer.com/)

Yet another game that was sadly to be caught up in the demise of Hi-Tec Software back in 1992. This was to be a 3rd Yogi Bear game from the company, and was only really known about for the C64 when listed as a competition prize in the Daffy Duck compo in Zzap.

The game was fully released on the Amiga (http://hol.abime.net/1649) and ST. The C64 edition was a conversion that was being done by Ashley Routledge and Dave Saunders, started approximately as Daffy Duck was nearing completion.

Yogi featured in your typical platformer, spanning across 4 levels where he must tidy up rubbish in Jellystone Park, find parts of a bike in the swamp, find objects for different characters in the film studio and then conclude by trying to find all the pieces of his bed in the underground caves.

Borrowing from their previous code libraries, it didn’t take long until the conversion was almost complete. The underwater section had been dropped, but otherwise it was all mostly there. Things just needed stitching together, bug fixing, an end sequence produced and tunes composing by someone. Unfortunately, just before this could all happen – Hi-Tec went into financial trouble, and the game was caught up in the mess.

David Palmer attempted briefly to launch a new publishing arm, by launching a Citizen Software label in early 1993 which would support 8-bit and 16-bit platforms. Ash and Dave span up work yet again on Yogi 3 to try and do a bit more work, and changed the titles a bit in preparation. However, it was decided at that point to move away completely from the 8-bit platforms and concentrate purely on console developments. Daffy and Yogi both could have almost snuck out after all!

As with Daffy, Yogi 3 was to sit on its development disks for many years – until in 2015, the complete source code and assets were recovered in PDS format after borrowing Ashley Routledge’s work disks. Around the time that Daffy was being pieced together, Yogi 3 was also compiled to see what was there – but found to be very broken in places and nowhere near as complete as Daffy Duck.

Over the past year and on and off, Martin Pugh has carefully pieced the game together – using the Amiga/ST version as a reference point, with much testing carried out. Each level was at the start was essentially a separate component, not linked at all in any way. Much of this work was yet to be done, and Ash and Dave hadn’t had chance to do so.

There were many bugs that prevented picking up and dropping items that needed to be fixed, especially on the Swamp level. The rooms which Yogi could enter on Level 3 had not been properly patched in, so this was done, so the level could actually be played and completed. Level 4 had some heavy glitches, which most have now been fixed. Although there still are a few minor glitches for the colour scrolling, the game is now at last fully playable – and all 4 levels have been linked up. Even the code for level completion, game over and level linkup + loading wasn’t present and had to be coded in.

The title screen and high-score parts were partially there, but needed to be linked up and score entry + saving code developed. Music was sadly nowhere to be seen, and likely not to have been composed at all. No doubt it would have been done by Gerard Gourley. There would luckily be SFX included in the game, created by Ashley Routledge.

Crucially though – although a loading screen was present, there was no ending screen or any reference to an ending in the code. Ashley had not got round to doing one. Sadly Ash was too busy to produce a new one, so we asked Steven Day if he would produce one instead.

Luckily Ste very kindly agreed, and not only produced an ending screen (inspired by the Amiga/ST ending), but also finished the (believed to be incomplete) loading screen, in the style of Ash. As a bonus, Joachim Wijnhoven and Neo very kindly composed a brand new tune to accompany a specially produced end sequence to round the game off and make it complete. Hopefully as close as possible to how it could have been, had been released by Hi-Tec back in the day.

So for our 2000th GTW entry, we are very proud to present yet another long lost Hi-Tec game in a fully playable state. We hope you enjoy it, and here is to many more recoveries in the future!