Games That Weren't^®

Yet another title from Starbyte and Bonespark… and yet another GTW entry. This time we are greeted with a promising looking arcade adventure game, which sadly doesn’t seem to have got very far before it was cancelled.

Originally, the game was known as Dragon Slayer, another title in the archives and which was being developed by a team at Linel Software. This was shaping up to be a sideway scrolling arcade adventure in the style of Rastan.

However, the project got switched to Starbyte, with a new team of developers, and the title started to become (As Oliver describes) “more like Psygnosis’ Barbarian”.

Bonespark was asked to do the C64 conversion, and so Oliver and Markus were assigned to the game. Oliver created two screens for the game (which can both be found here), and Markus composed one tune (again found here).

Starbyte soon cancelled the game, as they did not agree to the conditions set by Bonespark. So the game never progressed really beyond what is here now.

There is no coder mentioned, though it is assumed that Markus was in fact going to be doing the coding. I assume also that Oliver never mentioned a coder, because there was no code ever started. Unless Linel had some C64 code done for their version.

At the moment, it seems this entry is complete… Maybe some additional words from Markus and other information will close the doors on this game’s case.

Looking at the remains, it looks and sounds good.. but sadly we may never know how good this really would have been…

Another potential stunner lost…

Time to put this one out of its misery.. maybe? Virus has been one of the mysterious mysteries in the lost gaming world on the C64, the subject of rumour and also April fool jokes!

It is a 3D game where you view your ship from outside, and fly around stunning (stunning at the time) landscapes destroying enemies across a landscape map. It was an advanced 16-bit game which only maybe Geoff Crammond could have managed on the humble C64 maybe.

Firstly from what we know… the real conversion of Virus, if it was ever started, was to contain non-filled vector graphics like the released Spectrum version (Yes – The Speccy indeed got a conversion!)

The second wind of a possible conversion was teasingly mentioned by Zzap 64 in Issue #60, being converted by a “David Doll” and using a number of disk accessing techniques which pushed the limits of the C64.

A screenshot was also given with a “patchwork quilt” effect landscape. This turned out to be an April Fools joke, and the conversion was never heard of again,

Then thirdly – in 1990, a one off games guide was released for the C64, called “The Complete Guide to the C64”, which contained reviews of all of the top games on the C64. One review to startle readers was of Virus on the C64. Just a little box-out, describing a game which depicts a Spectrum port of sorts.. but no screenshots.

It was widely believed that this mention was based on poor research and journalism, and this was simply added to fill the magazine. A bizarre one to add as a filler.

However we were not entirely sure if anything was started, completed, released or what. Well, in 2014 – David Doll himself got in touch with GTW64 and confirmed that the entire Zzap segment was indeed an April Fools joke. David sent a number of April Fool ideas to Zzap to run with (including a Space Ace fake), Virus was one of those where he produced several screens, popped them on a disk and sent them to Zzap. Next thing David knew, a screen was printed in Zzap and a cheque for £40 was sent to David for his work. And that was that.

It would be interesting to see if David has anything of those original screens he posted to Zzap, so we’ll have to watch this space.

Richard Hewison (Who used to run the excellent “Bird Sanctuary” site) also confirmed to GTW that Firebird had no official C64 conversion planned… and that it was a miracle that the Spectrum version ever came about. Actually… read this archived page here to find out more about how the Spectrum version made it in particular.

So was there any unofficial attempt made?… It seems not, and quite likely that we will never find anything of this game.

Vapourware indeed it seems… Case closed…

A big thanks to Carlos who recently flagged up this game which some light was shed at the Spanish retro-party RetroMatrid in 2010. Viaje al Centro de la Tierra (Journey to the Center of the Earth) was a sort of Myth/Indiana Jones style game.

Carlos spoke with Alfonso Fernández Borro (Borrocop), a well-known spanish graphic artist that worked on a lot of titles in the 80’s under Topo Soft label. He confirmed that he worked on the C64 version of ‘Viaje al Centro de la Tierra’ (Journey to the Center of the Earth), which was a well received game on the ZX Spectrum back in 1989

According to Alfonso, the first two levels were completed – when the developer was relieved of his duties whilst the third level was in development. The game then unfortunately got cancelled as a whole, and things were never to be.

We’re not sure how well the conversion was going overall and how it was looking in comparison to the Spectrum version, but we hope to see something soon with quite a few Topo Soft contacts being dug up thanks to Carlos.

Thanks to contributor Martin Inter, we have learnt that Alfonso recovered a bunch of C64 images and graphics from the abandoned conversion and posted them on the Topo Soft group on Facebook several years ago. Alfonso had tried to recover something of the actual development from Jesus Medina, but with no success.  It’s believed that it was being looked into at trying to get the conversion properly finished.

Hopefully the situation will change at some point and something of the conversion can be found and shared.