Games That Weren't^®

Sophistry is not to be confused with the other entry within GTW which was for Hewson and a Quix clone. CRL’s Sophistry game was to be a isometic 3D game in the style of Bobby Bearing, and recieved glowing reviews on the Spectrum … http://www.ysrnry.co.uk/articles/sophistry.htm

The Games Machine mentioned that a C64 version was being started, but we never heard any more. We are guessing that the game was going to be a straight spectrum port, but the speed issues as with many conversions for this type of game was a bit crap and the game scrapped as a result.

Clem Chambers suggested that they may not have been able to find a developer who could port the game at a decent speed from the Spectrum. It’s clear that a C64 version was planned, but it could not be recalled if this was actually started or scrapped when a suitable developer could not be found.

Maybe you know something?

This was one of the first games to be released by newly set up team, Arcanum developments. This team consisted of Mark Kelly, his brother, Robert McGowan, Barry Leitch and Alan Mac.

The game was being done for Hewson, and was to be a Quix clone featuring cool looking graphics. It was rumoured that Firebird weren’t really happy with the idea of a Zolyxx clone being produced, so they came down on Hewson like a ton of bricks and the game was promptly cancelled.

However, Richard Hewison sees it differently and that there wasn’t really any pressure from Firebird at all. It is suggested that Hewson saw the issues with the on-going court case with Telecomsoft over Morpheus (and Magnetron) and this influenced their decision to ditch the game. But there is a little bit more to it aswell, which seems to be the overall answer. Essentially the developers were quite young at the time, Robert McGowan had the following to say:

“At the time, me being 16 and xenon being about 14 I think, neither of us really had the mathematical skills to work out the fill routine in stix (basically an algorithm to subtract successive squares and pick the smallest possible enclosed area) so we just started working on whatever we liked (for me that turned out to be the scrolling shoot-em up called Marauder which Hewson actually sold)”

Eventually the team broke up, and no-one really got paid… the game was canned as a result. It is not known if the game still exists today, but we hope to find out soon by getting in touch with Mark and seeing if anything still exists anywhere.

Barry’s music still exists, and can be found here to download and have a listen to. Barry described it by saying “It’s shite! :) “… but its still a small piece of the game which has survived.

Time will tell, but more research needed at the moment…

More soon on this we hope!…

Originally we didn’t know a great deal about this game, only that it would have been the sequel to the released game and featured more from the popular series.

However, news has recently surfaced on the World of Spectrum about the sequel from Clockwize and confirmation of the conversions. Taken directly from the World of Spectrum entry, Dean Hickingbottom recalls…

“The ZX version was ported to the Amstrad CPC. There are also CBM64 and Atari 8 bit versions. This game was never released due to a dispute between Alternative and Clockwize.”

Nothing seems to have been mentioned in the likes of Commodore Format, like with Thomas The Tank Engine 2… so how far did the C64 version get?

The note from Dean seems to suggest just that and it was merely a dispute with Alternative that prevented the game from seeing the light of day… Could we therefore be eventually seeing a full version of this game?…

We could indeed – the game has been confirmed as being completed and a master disk produced and hopefully in the future it should see the light of day. The inlays were even produced, but sadly Dean doesn’t have any of them. Developer names have been confirmed also!

Sadly Alternative do not wish the game to go out, so we may have to just put screenshots up for now.   We also have learnt that there were actually two versions produced.  An earlier edition by Keith was not quite good enough, so it was redone by Dave and Dean.

More soon we hope!

A huge hit on the MegaDrive and other SEGA systems. In the early 90’s, SEGA signed a deal with U.S. Gold to allow them to convert their titles to other computer systems, with titles such as E-Swat and Alien Storm seeing release.

Sonic was actually amongst the planned games for the C64 and other platforms, and U.S. Gold were eagerly awaiting Sega’s permission to start work on converting it over. Issue 77 of Zzap!64 in particular had a small article about upcoming games, which included Sonic.

U.S. Gold waited and waited, but Sega decided that their blue hedgehog creature was far too popular. People were buying a MegaDrive just to play the game, so they kept it as an exclusive to their platforms. It was only in much later years that Sonic would appear on platforms such as PC and the Nintendo Wii.

It is intriguing to know if any conversion was ever started, but it is highly unlikely. Could it have maybe been something close’ish to the SEGA Master System version perhaps? Interestingly, some Amiga mockup screens were produced, but its not yet known if they were just fakes produced in Deluxe Paint.

At least we had Mayhem in Monsterland!

We have to find this one!…. According to the game’s creator, this was heavily inspired by one of my favourite Vic 20 games of all time, Myraid by Rabbit Software.

This was infact released on the C16 by Bug Byte, and according to Stephen, should have also been released on the C64 too, but for reasons unknown … Bug Byte did not release it.

It is a frantic shoot-em-up which will be very worth finding again, and Stephen offers hope that he may still have something of the conversion on some old disks. Stephen some day will be digging these out for us to try and find some of his long lost games.

For now, check out the C16 conversion at http://plus4.emucamp.com/software/Solo and just hope that we may see a C64 version sometime soon.

Yet another Beyond Belief game which was planned and mentioned in the interview with Jim Scott.

Information is a bit scarce, and all we knew was that the game was to be a horizontally scrolling game like Rubicon/Hawkeye. Well, the game did surface on the Spectrum at least, but on Your Sinclair’s covermount… http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0004635

The game was a flick screen shooter which wasn’t that bad, but unfortunately Beyond Belief never quite took off as a label and sold off some of its complete titles to the magazines at the time. Commodore Format for example got Shellshock for their covermount.

Contact has been made with Jim Scott, but sadly we have not heard anything back just yet. Hopefully soon we will hear back and find some information based on this game and the others. We are wondering just if any C64 conversion was ever started … we certainly hope so!

So for now we have no credits for the game, so hopefully someone will step forward for it.

More research needed…

Another game which was promised at the end of the C64’s commercial life. As games ceased up,there was news of many more games coming our way.

Solaris was one such title which was being created by C64 muscian Andrew (Drew) Rodger. Andrew was previously famous for his Terminus demo, and his wide range of music he did for companies such as Zeppelin Games. His programming ability was as good as his music abilities.

The game was simply described and mentioned once as “a heart-attack inducing single screen blaster!” in issue 47 of Commodore Format. For years we tried to get hold of Andrew, but however thanks to Andrew Fisher, we got in touch with Andrew in 2013 and find that sadly the game never really got off the ground.

Out of the 3 titles, Solaris is the title which Andrew is least familiar with – though strangely he believes he coded the most for it. It is believed to be a fixed screen blaster in the style of Galaga or Vyper on the Amiga.

The game sadly didn’t get too far, but Andrew is hoping to check his disks very soon and see if there is anything to be saved.

Check out the creator speaks section for now, but could potentially be a case closed very soon it seems!

Software House is a management game where you must manage a software house, buy in titles and sell them on for maximum profit. This particular Cult game was nothing spectacular, but well worthy of preserving anyway!

The game exists on the Spectrum at http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0004620 , but the C64 Cult advertised version is missing.

However, a GTW contributor has found http://gb64.com/game.php?id =6998 sitting in Gamebase 64, and indeed it seems to be the very game that Cult should have released. Do a comparison of the fields in the Spectrum shots, and the C64. It seems that the game was sold to Your Commodore and Cult did not release it. Or did Cult only release it in limited numbers and it has not been found yet?

Well, it seems the game was in fact released by CULT as confirmed here at RetroCollector.org.

So it is a case closed!

Yet another Beyond Belief game which was planned and mentioned in the interview with Jim Scott.

Information is a bit scarce, as all we currently know is that the game was first being developed on the Amiga as a full price game, and then being converted to the C64. It was to be a Sensible Soccer style game, but this time having the ball stick to your feet (Which might have made it very easy to play)..

Contact has been made with Jim Scott, but sadly we have not heard anything back just yet. Hopefully soon we will hear back and find some information based on this game and the others.

So for now we have no credits for the game, so hopefully someone will step forward for it.

More research needed…

Ocean had a bucket load of titles in development at the time, and Snow Bros was one of them. This was going to be a conversion of the fairly popular arcade, which was a sort of clone of Bubble Bobble with snow.

The game promised some great graphics and sound in typical Ocean style, but it was never to be. Only a few news snippets were the existence of this game in the magazines, and no screenshots ever surfaced. Here is a CVG one below thanks to Ross Sillifant.

For years it has been pretty much rumour mill that a conversion ever took place at all, but when the Amiga and ST versions were confirmed (and Amiga version recovered), it suggested that conversions for the 8-bits could well have taken place.

In 2020, Twilight developed Andy Swann confirmed that the conversion of Snow Bros was going to be their first work for Ocean. They had the arcade board in a silver case ready to go, but at the last moment the game was swapped for Plotting instead.

Andy confirmed that as a result, no code was ever started (at least by Twilight). Had they done the game, code would have been by Stuart Cook (who did Plotting) and the Spectrum version by Jase McGann.

When asked on Twitter by @JamesPond47 if there were any concerns, Andy responded that it would have been a challenge – but would have tried their best. One player only was likely too.

It doesn’t quite close the case – as the 16-bit versions did get worked on. Was the work moved onto another team or brought in house perhaps? We’re still not sure. But certainly we now know that the conversions were in the process of being started at the very least.