Games That Weren't^®

Text adventure from Kayde who went into administration at the 26th August 1983. Did Spectrum releases, tried to do C64 and Vic 20 ones, which never seemed to surface.

The game in the advert (Two adverts were submitted by Peter Weighill) was described as follows:

“In your time you have done many things for many people. Your blade has seen the service of more than one nation, and have been the downfall of many brave opponents. Now you are in the service of Rambol the Merchant. Will you be able to discover Roundsby’s secret?”

We don’t know how far the game got exactly, but do you know any more?

Can you help?

Its a Demonware title yet again, and yet another Commodore Format Early Warning title.

And you guessed it!… another one which never surfaced in any shape or form other than its blip on the CF scanner.

We can only assume that the game would have been more of the same overhead puzzle action, with various new puzzles, collectables and improvements. It would have been interesting to hear about the plans of this game.

We know nothing about the development of the game, or who was behind it. Demonware are likely to have collapsed during the game’s development, if it was ever started.

Apologies for not knowing more at the moment, but again we hope that someone will come forward and claim they were working on this. More information soon we hope.

Would it have been as good as the first game?… Who knows? ….

A shoot-em-up game which got a release on the Amiga was also due for the C64 too, but seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth since its magazine advert.

The Amiga game wasn’t too bad, but not overall that popular. It would have still been nice to see a C64 conversion, but we can’t have everything :)

It is not known what exactly happened, as its early days yet – we have very little leads. But we hope to do some digging very soon and uncover something on this intriguing title.

How far did it get?… Was it completed?… Questions which need answering.

Answers soon we hope…

A game which has a rather strong link to Mayhem In Monsterland as you may tell from the title of this game.

Theo sauraus was the beginnings of Mayhem In Monsterland, where the main character was a cute dragon named Theo whose parents were brutally slain my merciless villagers in medieval times. Theo would progress through villages to gain revenge, crushing castles, torching knights and getting redemption.

Although the idea looked good, and a few ideas were set out, it was sadly cancelled… but for good reason and to make way for the awesome Mayhem In Monsterland, which did get released. Apex had the following to say from their Mayhem Diaries…."The main character was a cute baby dragon named Theo, whose
parents were brutally slain by merciless villagers in medieval times, Theo would progress through villages crushing castles, torching knights and generally dishing out justice (in quite sizeable portions). It was scrapped to make way for…. Mayhem in Monsterland (da-daaa!)."

We don’t know how much of the game was started, but we don’t believe much was ever made. Chances of finding remains are remote, but we’ll try our best.

More soon we hope…

More Activision for GTW, and this time a graphic adventure game called "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", based on the Science-Fiction novel from Robert A. Heinlein ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress ).

All we know is that Charles H Weidman is linked to the game through doing the graphics, though its listed on the Eager webpage as being for the PC version ( http://eager.back2roots.org /PROG/W/WEIDMAN.html ). So was he involved on the C64 version? Would his graphics have just been ported, or would it have been a text only game?

John Burns who maintains Eager mentioned to GTW64 that there was no mention of any version other than the PC version. Charles apparently only said that the PC version was ever started, which was mentioned on his old website that sadly no longer exists. So was anything ever started?

It’s possible that the reason the game was never released was that Activision at somepoint closed their Infocom section, but wasn’t this in 1989/90? Otherwise its unknown just why this game was cancelled, and we could probably speculate all day :-)

More soon on this one…

This was a SEUCK game released commercially by Compass Software and reviewed by Commodore User in June 1988 in their Cheapo Round up section.

According to the review, the game acked in gameplay and suffered from too many bullets.
The game itself was simply described as a “Run up the garden shooting insects and die a lot” game and got 1/10 for its troubles. Seemed also to be part of a series, with “The Future Zone” reviewed in another issue.

Compass Software were more known for their adventure games, and in particular on the ZX Spectrum. But did Compass decide after the review that it was not worth releasing, or were small numbers released and sneaked out into the world?

We’d love to find it, even if just for the SEUCK vault. But are interested to see also if it had enhancements like Wheelies did back at the same/similiar time.

More soon on this we hope…

Briefly mentioned in an issue of Commodore Cracker, there was a brief news item saying that the conversion of Theme Park for the C64 was looking seriously delayed.

It never surfaced unsurprisingly, and was most likely vapourware. Note in the news was that it was looking seriously delayed.

There honestly isn’t anything to add at the moment. Likely to be nothing, but interesting none the less!

We have added scans from Commodore Cracker, which suggests some names behind Retros – including a Matthew Withers. Can they be found?

More soon on this one we hope!

The Magic Roundabout was a tie-in with the TV show of the same name, CRL published the Spectrum version and were working on a C64 version (As mentioned in an issue of Your Commodore). The spectrum version can be found here: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0002985

The game itself was a simple collect them up and received average reviews.

We are not 100% sure of what happened to the C64 conversion though. According to the ex-head of CRL, Clement Chambers, it is thought that not much was done on the C64 version due to it not being able to handle the scrolling used in the game. We will need clarification of this from the developers to be sure though.

Jay Derrett had thought that the game was actually completed and believes that he transcribed the music. He did recall that the game was coded by a chap called Peter Jobate – a name not very common on the C64 platform, with no other games released.

Where is Pete now? Can the story of this game be solved as well as us find something?