Games That Weren't^®

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.

A title which we have somewhat overlooked until someone resurrected the forum post on Lemon 64…

Space Talisman (Or Labyrinth as its also known) is an early version of Hero Of The Golden Talisman, which is quite a bit different, featuring different music, screens, enemies and a rather bizzare swimming animation!

The game was first brought to light by eregil, a poster on Lemon64 who had the game on a pirated games compilation. He backed this up and showed people on the forum this very strange discovery. The game at this point was known as Labyrinth, though no titles screen to exist in the game.

It seems that an earlier version was leaked, and this was it. Potentially Shaun could have programmed this version for Mr Chip software before they fully started getting software released on the Mastertronic label. It’s possible that the game was signed up on the basis of this version, but with the agreement that it was tidied up and turned into something a bit more appealing. We’re not sure, but Andrew Fisher is now attempting to get hold of Shaun again to find out more about this obscure version.

I’ve cut and pasted some of the evaluation against HOTGT from eregil:

1) Part of the rolling credits are identical. There is the self-interview (with very minor changes), same jokes.

2) HOTGT looks very much like a further elaborated version of “Labyrinth”. Both have 5 sections, in each section you have to solve a puzzle of some sort to advance to the next. HOTGT is more complex since its first section, whereas the first section is very simple in “Labyrinth” and only in the 4th-5th one the puzzles become somewhat challenging. HOTGT has a “mini-map” of sort in the lower-left corner which is missing in “Labyrinth”.

3) “Labyrinth” actually has what seems to me to be a bug of sort, where in the 4th section you can’t get to open a gate which gives you access to the green key – therefore you can only complete the game if you saved a universal key from a previous section to use on the green gate in the 4th one.

A full evaluation can be seen via the map which eregil also produced.

Later, iAN CooG cracked the game under the title of Space Talisman, and which we have also included in the download and kept as the title for now (Unless Shaun says different).

It’s a great little finding, especially as its quite different in some ways. Check it out and do your own comparisons. In the meantime we’ll get digging and try to find out the true story behind this obscure early version…

Does Shaun remember this?… we’ll find out soon!…