Games That Weren't^®

A great little finding which has come to GTW thanks to Roberto Nicoletti.

Steel Robot was produced by Italian Simone Balestra who programmed Clik Clak for Idea Software in the early 90’s. It was the result of a conversation with Simone by Roberto, that the game was uncovered when Simone sent Roberto a copy of his unreleased game.

Simone had the following to say:

“I’ve finally found one of my first games: ‘Steel Robot’… Good thing ten years ago I gave all my floppy disks to Ivan Del Duca to have them dumped. Looking back at it a weird feeling got me! Honestly I forgot how difficult it was. I actually thought it was way easier than this… now that I played it again I remember, while coding it, I specifically included some dirty tricks to make it more difficult, such as loosing some energy if a minimum score is not reached”

The game itself is best described as a kind of Transbot clone (Whom Master System fans will be well aware of) or seems to be inspired by it. It’s not quite as polished as Transbot, but its a nice early indication of Simone’s coding talent with some very nice touches in the game.

It’s a great little finding, and i’m glad its been preserved. You’ll be happy to know that it is infact a full game and has never been seen before. A big thanks to Roberto for his hard work uncovering the game. Now you can enjoy it too for the first time as Simone had originally intended.

Now we just need to find out why this game never got released in the first place and close the case.

Certainly worth a look!… Another game saved!…

Thanks to Scott Julian, GTW is proud to present another game saved from oblivion in the shape and form of Starsat. An Australian RPG style game, fully completed, but sadly never released.

I’m not too sure of the story behind the game, but upon loading you are greeted with a level design with the same aspect as with Spindizzy.

Here you can take control of one of three vehicles, which have differing strengths and weaknesses such as speed and weapons. You navigate your tank, ship through various screens with the ability to destroy other enemy craft.

There is likely to be much more to it, but due to not being much of an RPG fan, I haven’t had chance to really explore the game fully. We will get a better description of the game sometime soon.

The game does not seem bad at all, and one which many of us would have no doubt bought had it been released. So why did it not get a release?… Well, Australian distributor Pactronics was offered the game, who often dealt with Utilities rather than games. Unfortunately, just as the game was completed, no deal could be agreed, and so the game was not released.

For reasons unknown, the game doesn’t seem to have been released elsewhere. Maybe it was attempted, but no-one wanted the game. Very strange.

This is what Scott had to say about the game, “It is called Starsat by Bit by Bit software in Australia. The game was offered to an Australian distributor called Pactronics (very large during the 80s and early 90s). I worked for them in various rolls including programming (mostly Atari ST stuff) and some C64 utilities.

This game was offered but failed to reach agreement and unfortunately never released, Sorry I couldn’t find any instructions, but I seem to remember that you move around STARSAT by pressing keys 1 thru 8.”

It’s now thanks to Scott that the game has been found and saved, but we hope to speak to the game’s developers in the future and get their side of the story on the game. Not much is really known, and we’re sure that there is a few stories to tell about this game.

Interestingly to add, this is labelled as Version 1.02… We therefore assume that there could have been more done, but we doubt it. We feel this is pretty much it. Though we will try to find out once contact has been made with the developers.

In March 2022 – Dan Warren created a video showing the game ending. Here is the link if you’d like to see it.

In October 2023, author Jeff Pritchard revealed that they had trusted someone with connections to represent them to get the game published, but they didn’t have the experience. The deal with Pactronics was not known about or communicated as being offered, let alone any discussion. Sadly they were not kept advised at all and it was likely never offered to anyone else.

A sad end to the title, that thankfully it was saved for people to enjoy as Jeff intended. Check it out and enjoy, and a big thanks to Scott again for helping save this game.

Back in the 1980’s, Atarisoft were doing official arcade conversions for the Commodore 64. Stargate was one of them, and we learn of this conversion thanks to Mat Allen who has documented the conversion briefly in Digital Press.

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.

It was suggested that Steve Evans had originally programmed the game for Atarisoft (as a modified version of Guardian as Stargate has been out there for sometime), and that he took his game and eventually had it released under the name of Guardian for Alligator Software. Rich Stevenson had a vague recollection that Steve gave him a copy of Stargate with that very name, to give feedback and improvements.

So was Guardian really originally intended as Stargate for Atarisoft? No it wasn’t. Thanks to Vinny Mainolfi, Steve confirmed that it was just a hacked version of his Guardian game. He was disappointed but amused when he downloaded a game image in later years with the changes. So, that rules that out firstly.

Then in 2013, Kurt Woloch discovered a photo at CES 1984 by GCC which seemed to show a portion of Stargate running on a C64. Jeff Minter had spotted and made a connection with the Vic 20 conversion – highlighting that the score panel areas look very similar. This suggested that the game was very likely written by Tom Griner.

Jeff also added that he saw an interview with Tom, where work on a C64 conversion was mentioned. Looking at Tom’s other C64 work, we can also see a slight bit of familiarity with Robotron and the Joust game which is also missing.

We’ve since confirmed that the CES screenshot was just a snippet of the VIC-20 version of Defender. However, the link had been made to Tom Griner early on as potentially being the developer – after his links to Defender on the VIC-20.

In 2024, collector Ken Van Mersbergen then found the master Atarisoft list on a tape backup and found the following information about the C64 version of Stargate:

ATARISOFT PRODUCT MASTERS – FIRST WAVE

COMPUTER NAME REV MEDIA

C64 STARGATE 1 EPROMS
C64 STARGATE 2 EPROMS
C64 STARGATE 3 EPROMS
C64 STARGATE 4 EPROMS
C64 STARGATE 5 EPROMS
C64 STARGATE 6 EPROMS
C64 STARGATE 7 EPROMS
C64 STARGATE 8 EPROMS
C64 STARGATE 9 EPROMS

This pretty much confirmed that the game existed in Atari’s own archives at some point – so we were in hope that something was out there, waiting to be discovered.

Well, in September 2024 – archivist Ken Van Mersbergen got in touch to say that he had recovered Stargate, and has passed it over to Games That Weren’t to add to the archive. The game was meant to be released during Wave 1 in 1983, but was never to be. We hope to find out exactly why very soon and will update the page when we have more details.

Although the conversion is by no means perfect, it is complete and fully playable, though Mat Allen has spotted a major bug where you lose a life after every level complete (something that would have got picked up had the game been tested). Overall though, it is a great glimpse of yet another piece of Commodore 64 history.

Thanks to Rob Caporetto for the great video on the game, which we’ve embedded at the top of the page.