Games That Weren't^®

Following on from UFO 2, comes UFO 3!… a quick sequel which was developed for Commodore Disk User, but sadly just before CDU could publish, the publication folded… and so the game was never to be and remained on Ste’s disks until now…

The game follows on from the prequel, where you must get your ship across each part of a dreadnought. There are this time a lot of enhancements to the original, such as graphics, sound and variety. There is not loads to look at here, but it is a good progression from UFO 2, and again shows Ste’s gradual progression in his programming ability before he got to the likes of Limbo 1 and 2.

More information is needed on why this game was not published and why it has sat on a disk for so long. Although it is not the best game in the world, it is nice to be able to preserve it along with its prequel and ensure the hard work is seen by others.

Check it out, and also the other game in the series….

Another game case opened, and another closed…

A new game, and one which we believe may not have had a release. This game was sold to Popular Computing Weekly by
a young Ste Pattullo at the young age of 16 for around £100.

The game is kind of a still screen version of Uridium (looks wise), where you must get to the end of the screen while avoiding enemies. It is quite simplistic, and you should not expect anything too advanced here. This was the early days of Ste’s coding, where things were coming together. The majority of the work was done in BASIC.

This is what Ste had to say about the game…

“UFO 2… Oh dear! Published in 1986 by Popular Computing Weekly. It was hyped up somewhat by the magazine, but who cares. It made me a few hundred quid at 16 yrs of age!”

The game was therefore fully completed, and we don’t know what has prevented its release for so long. Now we unleash the game into the world for people to check out. UFO 1 was actually published by PCW in the same year, and Ste got paid £300 for his original efforts. It was a BASIC listing. UFO2 unfortunately was not so lucky to get released, although Ste was paid for his work.

Already as we open the case on this game, we close…

A rather ambitious title which sadly never made it as more current life commitments came about.

This was to be a cross between Narc, Splatterhouse and Final Fight, featuring some nice graphics similar to those in Rubicon, and over 200 frames of animation. The bitmaps were quite large, so the 1541 had to be hacked quite well to load in the graphics at good speed. Music was composed for the game and worked very well with the game. The game was being produced around 1990/1991 time.

It took about a year to come up with a fully playable level of a game which was very ambitious to say the least. It was demoed to people, but no-one really picked up the project, and eventually it was realised that the game was just TOO ambitious to be created for the C64, especially for the tape market!

GTW first learnt about the game back in 2006, and things stalled a little with the fixing of the game to present to you due to real life commitments.

But in December 2010, GTW is finally proud to present you with all the remains to Undead. This includes a specially produced slideshow and tidied up and running version of the game by Conrad! The slideshow in particular is superb!

Thankfully you get to play the first level so you can get the chance to see how things were. Overall its quite like Splatterhouse more than the others! Although there are glitches and things are not quite complete, it is quite fun to play and pick up objects and there is a large amount of controls to know. Here is an overview from the author:

INSTRUCTIONS
Use joystick in port 2

• Fire – hit / fire gun / use item / throw, it will alter on three different hits. If zombie is close, player will grab it and hold.
• Left / Right – move forward or backward. Hold fire to turn
• Up – pick item from the wall (not useful in this demo)
• Down – pick item / crouch (fire when crouch will activate the kick)
• Space – use gun / put gun away

Tips: You can use zombie as club, let them come close and press fire to grab, if you hold fire and press left / right, Jon Plissken will wield zombie
You can take up to three bites, then Jon will fall down and lose a life. He will get up when you move the joystick

When playing the demo, some frames are not visible when moving left, unfortunately. Game will load up 16-colour bitmap screens while you walk, but there are only few of them. After the graphics run out, you will only see garbled mess.

Additionally there is a music demo which you can run and several story files. We have also included all the work disks with picture files and the original loader materials supplied from Miha, in case you want to have a sift through.

Overall it was a huge shame that the game never made it, as it looked to have a lot of promise. Maybe if the game was done in a slightly different way, it could have been released by a big company back in the day and done well.

However, in September 2021 – Miha Rinne announced that he and Pekka Kleimola had resumed work on the game and are now creating new development tools to ensure they can better realize the vision they had for the game. It will have lots of graphics, and will take lots of memory – so it will be released as a cartridge/flash image only.

Shortly afterwards, Miha contacted us to reveal a new development blog on the game which can be found and tracked at https://undeaddevblog.wordpress.com/ – enjoy!

Then in October 2022, Miha did a great video talking about the history of the project, also demonstrating the Necromancer (which is a new art + animation creation tool for C64 development). You can check this out below:

Also – Miha gave an update via a new blog post at:

Enter the Necromancer – Dead walk!

In January 2024, Miha gave a new update showing a prototype development in Unreal, to test gameplay and animations quickly before implementing on the C64:

Followed by a new blog update in March 2024. We’ll keep posting any new updates here until the game is finished, and finally escapes GTW :)

Then in November 2024, a gameplay video of the new demo version was released. It won’t be available on the net, but it was testable at the Zooparty 2024 event:

In April 2025, a further update video was posted of a vertical slice of the game:

This graphically superb clone of Capcom’s Black Tiger was in production by Gary Liddon of Zzap fame, and also Paul (Dokk) Docherty of various artistic efforts. The game looked great in the adverts, and the screenshots looked very tasty for the fellow game player.

Sadly the game was so similar to Black Tiger that publishers Firebird were apparently running scared, because of the hassle that Us-Gold had with Nintendo and Activision over Giana and Katakis respectively. It is also rumoured that Gary was slow with developing the game, and this is why not much was done in the time period of the game’s development.

From a discussion long ago with Gary Liddon, GTW’s David Simmons found that the game was never finished, and that there was a demo somewhere. Gary unfortunately didn’t have it and Dokk didn’t either.. So who did?… Well, someone did… and a pretty nigh complete version too…

TMR/Cosine kindly donated GTW a file from Firebird’s development system (PDS), which contained all the remaining source code for Tyger Tyger, at about 50% completion state. Gary Liddon actually sent TMR this file many moons ago, which Gary may have forgot about… Possibly Gary thought someone else could finish it.

For a while now, Jani Tahvanainen and Henrik Jansson have been examining the PDS file, and have managed to extract all the source code, and have been sifting slowly through the code and trying to put it all together.

And after a long hard slog.. GTW is now finally able to present you with a first ever release of the game thanks to these two great guys. A few people doubted whether we’d ever see Tyger Tyger even after the PDS turning up, but now you can see for yourselves what a mightily fine job they have done.

With what was pretty much like piecing together a million piece jigsaw, Tyger Tyger is finally here after a 15 year wait.. From what is seen, it is pretty much playable, though the game was only ever 50% complete… it still contains fantastic graphics and animations and overall about 4 levels approximately. It must be applauded for the incredible work that Jani and Henrik have done here… they have essentially saved a long awaited title for our C64, and I hope sincerley that they get the recognition and praise for this fantastic work!

Even one level got very badly corrupted, but Jani and Henrik luckily managed to salvage the majority of it and restore it back to its former glory, thanks to the scans on the GTW pages. It is to be noted that the game features a lot of bugs from its production days, and its possible to get stuck in the background etc. But there are a number of options and keys available to allow you to explore what was Tyger Tyger. You will be able to see for yourselves, that had this game been finished, it would have been a class act. Just look at some of the graphics and animations by Dokk to see why.

We recently in 2013 found a preview scan from Commodore User magazine, which shows the first level with a moon behind the trees. This cannot be found within the previews, so there may be more to find of the game in the future, or this is something just not activated in the game.

You will notice that there is no sound at all in the game. In 2012, a note from Charles Deenen was temporarily leaked which had a Maniacs of Noise release list from 1988 time. Listed was Tyger Tyger – suggesting that Maniacs of Noise were to do the SFX and tunes for the game had it been completed. The only tune that may have been meant for the game is Disco China by Charles Deenen.

It is believed that Gary was heavily distracted whilst developing the game – he tried to complete it by coming into the TelecomSoft office for a few weeks, but this didn’t help things and everything veered completely off course.

Gary got in touch via the comments (see below) in 2017 and confirmed that things had been slow during development and got to a tricky stage when Firebird were taken over by Microprose. For the game to continue at Microprose, the contract would have to be transferred – which was in Gary’s hands to do. He decided not to, and the game as a result was cancelled. He feels it would have been difficult to get the game properly finished anyway.

Interestingly, in Swedish magazine Datormagazin, issue 8 1989, page 4, there is an interview with Gary Liddon (see scan below). The article has the following to say about Tyger Tyger:

“The game idea for Tyger Tyger is Gary’s own, but he is not the sole person working on the game. The graphics are made by Paul Docherty, who normally works for System 3. Unfortunately, there were a few issues between System 3 and Paul, so Gary decided that it was best for Paul if he only worked for System 3. This left Gary standing with only background graphics. Gary called in his old friend Robin Leavy to do the Sprites. Robin has previously worked on e.g. Armalyte.”

Our anonymous contributor (thank you!) suggests that the passage is slightly confusing even in its original form, since it first seems to state that Paul is actively working on Tyger, only to go on saying that actually he has left and Robin has taken over. He suggests that perhaps the latter part is a last-minute addition to the interview before going to press. This may also explain the Le[a]vy typo, if it e.g. was heard over the phone at the final minute.

So what are you waiting for?… Download a piece of history. Gary Liddon’s legendary game has now come home at last…