Games That Weren't^®

The Vengenance of Zeno is a bit of an oddity for GTW, but a perfect addition to the archive.

The game is reported as missing on Gamebase 64, and the only recollection seems to be from an Anirog advert which was in Personal Computer News – Feb 1984.

Nothing has ever turned up of the game, and as a result is deemed to be unreleased.

Describing the game is a little hard, but considering that Anirog released a game on the Vic 20 a year or so earlier called Xeno 2 might give us a clue?… maybe this in some bizzare way is a similiar game? … a Lunar Landa based clone?

Well, nope – we were completely wrong and it seems the game was to be for the Stack Lightgun. Anirog released about 2 Stack Lightgun games… Could this have been renamed and become this: http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=7358&d=18&h=0

Very early days, but considering that sadly the past runners of Anirog have passed away, it could be very difficult to find out much more about this one!

Advertised in many magazines, this was a title being sold by Anik Microsystems… however only two Anik games exist and seem to have been released on the C64.

The advert describes the game as follows:

"You’ll hand it to this Bandit, it’s great."

Another fruit machine title – an easy guess :) The game was being sold very cheaply at around £4, compared to the higher price of their titles in Gamebase. Maybe this was a simple BASIC game that was being sold for quick profit?

We know very little more about this than the above, a lot more research needed and hopefully we will find some of the people who used to work for Anik.

More soon we hope…

Back in the 1980’s, Atarisoft were doing official conversions for the Commodore 64. Vanguard was one of them! We learn of this conversion thanks to Mat Allen who has documented the conversion briefly in Digital Press. We hope to learn more about the conversion soon as a result.

We are not sure at present how far the game got, or why it was cancelled, but we guessed it was due to Atarisoft breaking up at some point. However, Phobos/Ready64 found a snippet in Video Game Update (August 1984 – see scans) which suggests that Jack Tramiel got Atarisoft to stop all C64 developments and focus just on Atari. It wasn’t the video game crash that caused the cancellation of titles. Thanks to Roberto Nicoletti and Phobos for the heads up.

Thanks to Duc Nguyen, it has been found on the GDRI webpage that Designer Software was behind the conversion, and its possible that Bill Bogenreif was the coder. Early days, but its a lead!

Yet another GTW which sadly hasn’t got a great deal we can say about it. Commodore Format magazine in issue 17 mentioned this game in their previews, stating that Sales Curve were producing a St Valentines Day game to coincide with the annual event.

The game was described as a “Spicy Lurve game”, but this was it… and no more was ever heard.

Upon questioning the title to Simon Pick, the head of Sales Curve at the time, he did not remember ever hearing about the title. Possibly Commodore Format “Made it up” ?

Admittedly, Simon didn’t know that Sales Curve had Solar Jetman on the cards on the C64, and that was an out of house title. Maybe this game was too?

It is unknown if this game was intended as a full game or as a promotional kind of game. Certainly creating a game purely for one day of the year was a bit of a risk, so maybe they scrapped it before it even went past the ideas stage.

However, it was mentioned, it was planned… now to find out more. Fancy some spicy lurve with your C64, then think again!…

Virgin Atlantic Challenge was to be an arcade game based on Richard Branson’s attempt to break the transatlantic speed record in a boat. So, not the same game which was released later on with the rather cool Rob Hubbard tune.

The game was in fact released on the Spectrum and Amstrad, but sadly as what usually happens, the C64 version ran into a few troubles on deck.

According to Ian Munro, the game was actually written up by two different people. The first version (by whom we do not know) was actually scrapped because it didn’t quite cut the grade. Ian recalls:

“I think Virgin weren’t happy with with the way the C64 version was looking / working. It looked a lot different to the way the Spectrum and Amstrad versions looked. From what I remember it was quite grey in colour, it was a side view of the inside of a boat. I’m sure it had two levels (or platforms) and may have scrolled left and right. There was definitely a “ships cat” walking about.”

Commodore User magazine ran a big preview feature on the game, which also details a lot about the game and its features. See the gallery below for those scans. They mention the C64 version of course, and show screenshots – but from the Amstrad version (naughty!)

The game was then offered to Millside to do, after doing good conversions on the Amstrad and Spectrum. Jullian Cooper re-did all the graphics for the game and got them finished and ready to use by the programmer to pick up the project. Millside employed a programmer straight from school from an agency (Whom is believed to be Paul Smith). But after 4-5 weeks of work, the programmer left and the game was incomplete. There were still a number of bugs to be fixed, but Millside couldn’t get anyone to fix these.

By this time, Virgin had already been marketing the game on the Spectrum and Amstrad, and due to the heavy delays. Virgin decided to cancel the C64 version and put it to rest before any more money was wasted on the title.

The game itself was believed to be almost complete, but we cannot confirm this. Both Paul and Ian sadly had nothing of the C64 version, but suggested that the company directors could still have something of the C64 conversions that never were. We are now looking into finding both directors in the hope that they kept all the Millside work disks from that era.

For now the search goes on, but check out the Spectrum and Amstrad links above to get an idea of what was going to be.