Games That Weren't^®

Have you ever wondered why one game from the Wizardry-series is lacking from the C-64?

Well I did, and it led me to a little research in that area. After checking release dates it seems that the Wizardry-series was released later than I thought on the C-64 – Wizardry was made in 1987, while Wizardry II, III and V was made in 1988/89. I have always found it odd that the funniest (and hardest!) part of the series have gone missing. In Wizardry IV you play the evil wizard Werdna, breaking out of his dungeon prison, battling bands of heroes on the way up, summoning an army of monsters to help you on the way…

Said and done – I reckoned the easiest way to do it was to contact one of the authors, Robert Woodward:

My email to Robert:

“Hi Robert,

I saw a post from you in a forum some time ago and would like you to clear up a couple of matters, as you are one of the originators of the Wizardry series.

As a proud owner and a dedicated player of the first three Wizardry’s, I have always wondered why ‘Wizardry IV – The Return of Werdna’ never showed up on the C-64 when Wizardry V did? As far as I understood it from your post at /., you had developed Pascal interpreters for the C64 aswell? I furthermore read that the game was programmed and compiled on a NEC 9801 – was there a problem in making the compiled game running on the C-64 or were there other circumstances preventing the release?”

Robert Woodward’s answer:

“You know, I have no positive recollection why it didn’t happen, but one possibility was simply that ROW was too big to fit on the C64 floppy discs.”

—

Ok, Robert’s answer wasn’t exactly the most enlightening one, so I hunted on for Werdna himself – Andrew Greenberg. Andrew pointed me in the direction of the guy who made the conversion for the answer – Anton Treuenfels. After some googling, I found the answer i’ve been looking for all the time, posted by Anton Treuenfels himself on the MobyGames Developer BIO:

In 1987 Anton Treuenfels spent six months in lovely Ithaca, NY helping port “Wizardry 1: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord” to the Commodore 64 platform. Having done the hard part (coding a UCSD p-code interpreter), he subsequently helped port “Wizardry 2: Knight of Diamonds”, “Wizardry 3: Legacy of Llylgamn” and “Wizardry 5: Heart of the Maelstrom” to C64 in relatively short order in 1988.

Although technically no more difficult than the others, “Wizardry 4: Return of Werdna” was never ported to the C64 by decision of Sir-Tech Software after poor sales on other platforms.

And that’s the end of the story. Not so sad, but a rather interesting conclusion – poor sales was to blame.

Case closed before it even begins!…

An intriguing title from CRL which we know little about on the C64 and doesn’t seem to have been released on any other platform.

When GTW team member Alex Ross emailed the guys from CRL about this game, neither seemed to remember or believe such a game was on the books. It could be one of those obscure titles which has just been mentioned once and then forgotten about.

We have no clues to what the game was about and what style of game it would have been. We really have to do some digging just to get *something* on this particular title.

Do you know anything about it?…

Witch Way is a C64 conversion of a rather rare Vic 20 game from CDS (from the same time period as Road Toad).

Thanks to an archiver of the Vic 20 cartridge on the Denial Forum we can let you know what the game is about. The game is a single screen Donkey Kong style game where you start off in a big black cauldron with a damsel in distress at the bottom of the screen. Your mission is to get to the top where the water tap is, to turn it on and put out the fire before the damsel gets cooked! You need to beware of rolling rocks (possibly hot coals) and flying witches as you are messing with their supper.

It’s unsure how many levels there are, but in the Vic 20 version there is varience in the style of map.

As well as the Vic 20 version, CDS were producing the C64 conversion but it is unknown how far the game got and why it was cancelled. A lot more research required, but it will be nice to soon play the Vic 20 version at the very least. Vic 20 games in the early days were generally better than the C64 ones (The more basic games i’m really referring to :) )

Do you know anything about this conversion?…

Yet another film licence which was in development by Ocean Software back in 1990 also known as "Firebird".

This was only really reported in the pages of Commodore Format, Issue 4, and nothing else was really heard of the game after that.

We do not have any information on this title at present, and currently we are trying to find out if indeed the game did exist. Previous Ocean employees are being asked about the title and we hope to dig out some more information for you soon. Currently they don’t recall the C64 version.

It is possible that the game was cancelled and was turned into Navy Seals… like the Gameboy version had done. We need confirmation of this though.

If you have any information about the game, then please get in touch. There is loads more research needed for this title.

More research needed…

A very obscure title, and one we knew very little about – though ‘Anonymous Contributor’ (referenced as ‘AC’ in the rest of the page) has helped to shed some great light on the title. Much of the information written below is from the great findings of AC.

During the early days, it was found that Rainbow Arts and Time Warp were working on a title for the C64 called “Winetou”, however, nothing was seen or heard of the game, and as a result we had very little to show for it.

Zzap 64 in issue 46 had mentioned that Rainbow Arts were due to publish the game sometime in 1989. AC found however that the game could be a misspelling of the name “Winnetou”, a Native-American character that was created by German author Karl May in the late 1800s and the popular hero of a series of books.

We think that AC is on the money, and so we have updated the title of the game, and kept the old one as the alternative. It was when AC then searched for results with the new name that had come to light, there were many more hits.

German magazine Happy Computer would promote the game in its March 1988 issue, where more details were revealed about the game and said:

“Winnetou is coming!

Rainbow Arts has secured the computer game rights to all Karl May books for the next five years. The first »Winnetou 1« is scheduled to be released in the summer. It is planned as a role-playing game. Further Karl May games in the areas of strategy, action and skill are being planned. Winnetou 1 will be released for Amiga, Atari ST, C64, Schneider CPC and Spectrum.”

So, we now know that the game was a RPG and was to be a series of games planned – plus for many different platforms as well! Just how many of these were ever started?

As AC rightly pointed out, a 5-year option would suggest that the last game would have come out in 1993. Copyright would have likely disappeared in the 1980s, as Karl May had died in 1912. However, his Wikipedia page suggests that his works were being updated and renewed, so that could have something to do with it, and perhaps the estate had some kind of copyright over it.

Oddly, at a later date only the Amiga, ST and new PC DOS editions would be listed as coming soon in French magazine JoystickHebdo. Then Swedish magazine Datormagzin listed the game as forthcoming in 1989, but only for the Amiga, and that would still be the case in February 1990.

Oddly the game is listed as for sale for the C64 in German magazine Aktueller Software Markt issue 9 1989. However, the advert does come with the caveat: “Some of the titles in this ad are still announcements for the next few weeks – you should reserve these latest games now.”

After that, the trail went dead – though AC did find that there was another Winnetou game being developed in 1993 for the Amiga, which was actually reviewed. This game too was never released and only a demo snuck out – so that is going to be a separate entry for another time! We don’t think just yet that the two games were related directly.

As for the Rainbow Arts game – what happened to it, and can anything of it be found?

A quick entry, again as we lack information at present.

This is not the Mindscape game, but this was due to be a conversion of the Capcom arcade game. News of the conversion was mentioned in Commodore User magazine back in July 1989.

It seems that the conversion was scrapped due to Mindscape getting the licence just before US Gold got all future licences of Lucasfilm games.

So was anything of this ever started in the first place? No other conversions of the arcade surfaced, apart from we think some console versions developed by Capcom themselves.

More research needed…

An interesting entry which ties in quite nicely with Attack of the Killer Tomatoes by the same company. Wild Women of Wonga was to be based on one of those old really cheesy sci-fi movies which came out in the beginning (With hub caps on strings used for UFO’s etc), and along with Attack of the Mutant Tomatoes, this was to be a bit of fun making against the old franchises.

The Tomato game was never released unfortunately along with this game too.

Now this was briefly mentioned as a possible release after “Attack of the Mutant Tomatoes” and “Attack of the Mushroom People”, which were to be the first two in the series. This I guess would have followed the series as another game had the first two been successful and were released.

Of course, with neither of the two main titles getting released, it is very unlikely anything was ever started… it’s most likely to have been an idea that floated around, though it was planned and hence gets an entry for archivial purposes.

We hope to find out more soon…

This is a RPG based game with a slight twist on your typical western games. Here in this particular game you have to buy land, tools, materials and then start building up fame and gold in the wild west. You need to really do a lot of this before you can start progressing in the game.

The game had a mixed reception on the Amiga platform when it was released – it would have been interesting to see how the C64 version would have shaped up.

We’re not quite sure what happened to the C64 conversion, but it could well have been cancelled as the market began to decline in 1992. We need to find out more and hopefully dig up something of the game.

Do you know anything about this conversion?