Games That Weren't^®

Shockwave was first mentioned in The Games Machine with the following bit of blurb…

“While Xecutor does it for dual destruction on the Spectrum, Shockwave is a two player shoot ’em up on for the Commodore 64 complete with a weapon-collecting feature and horizontal scrolling.

You start life as a jet-packin’ droid building up armaments and attributes to become half human, half-jetplane. Then the option to decide what form you want to be is offered. As a droid you can reverse direction but not as a ship, so there’s going to be a bit of strategy involved to succeed. Tim promises great graphics too!”

So what happened?… we tried to find out more from Rob Whitaker, but sadly he knew nothing about such a game and so we are hoping to find out more by the management of The Edge and from the public themselves.

Well, it seems Shockwave was scrapped when the developers of the game were not paid. Tahir Rashid found the game within his collection recently and placed it onto Ebay. He was given a copy as he was an Artist at The Edge during 1986-88 (helping to create Darius, Soldier of Light and Alien Syndrome) to look at the artwork and see hot it was. Some photos from the ebay auction have been added.

Here are the photos from the auction: Photo 1 , Photo 2

Tahir Rasid had the following to say about the game:

“From what I remember it was very much like Sidewize from Firebird but with graphics like Armalyte as that was the trend for those types of games, and it was two player.

I think the disk that just sold contained this work in progress version with a few levels.”

It is hoped that the game by the time you read this article will have fell into hands of a fellow preserver so that it can be made available to everyone and eventually a download and more about the game will appear here.

For now the music has been preserved and is in HVSC!

Do you know anything more?

Yes… another game which did eventually get a release, but did you know that Shinobi was originally being developed by another team at Binary Design? No?… Well sit down and i’ll guide you through….

Originally Haydn Dalton was assigned to doing all the graphics on the game conversion along with a different developer called Chris Collins. About partway through the game was taken out of house and Simon Pick and another artist ended up doing the game instead.

The original game was completely scrapped and restarted by Simon and eventually got a release. It’s not entirely certain though why the original game was given to another team. Haydn’s graphics were coming along nicely and it all seems a little cloudy and odd at present.

It seems like the first version got to about 50% completion, so we are hopeful that we could find a rather different looking conversion in some form somewhere. Thats if anything has survived of the game… it may have stayed locked away at Binary Design HQ on a PDS somewhere.

We need to find out a lot more, starting with talking to Chris Collins himself!

Do you know anything about this?

Crystal Software and Electronics were an ambitious software house trying to save the C64 gaming market back in 1997 with a large range of planned releases. Sadly it wasn’t to be, and as with other companies – it was found not to be a financially viable proposition to try and make money out of the C64.

Out of the newly planned titles was Shian "Wu Dang" a C64 game and sequel to the also unreleased Shian "Tiger Style" which was described in adverts as follows:

"The second episode of our Shian adventure series. Both games will probably end up on one disk as a compilation when finished. We will try to incorporate a bit more arcade Kung-Fu action in the first episode and a bit more adventure in the second one. A good balance in a compilation is essential!"

"The sequel to Shain – Tiger Style… This time you have to rid the kingdom of evil…. The first Mandarin has taken up his sword against his sovereign and instructed his Samurai warriors to fight to the last man……"

This is all we currently know about the game, so its early days and we hope to find out more soon about this one!

Do you know anything more?

Crystal Software and Electronics were an ambitious software house trying to save the C64 gaming market back in 1997 with a large range of planned releases. Sadly it wasn’t to be, and as with other companies – it was found not to be a financially viable proposition to try and make money out of the C64.

Out of the newly planned titles was Shian "Tiger Style" a C64 game which was described in adverts as follows:

"The first of many episodes of this Kung-Fu arcade adventure. The game design is still in the drawingboard state but we feel confident that it will be ready for release within a year if we can find the right programming crew to do it."

"Do you have what it takes to play the role of a young kung-fu fighting royalist and restore your former king to glory? Your mission to get the sacred "Tiger Style" scrolls to the king of the neighbouring country will be hard, to say the least."

This is all we currently know about the game, so its early days (Though a sequel called Shian "Wu Dang" was planned even at this early stage) and we hope to find out more soon about this one!

Do you know anything more?

This is no joke, but even though the first game failed to come out commercially through Beyond Belief, Alan Benson was content on making up for the failures of the first game and so began work on the sequel.

The game was to be a split screen 2 player Green Beret style game and according to Alan got to a 75% completion stage. The game was sadly abandonded as the interest in the C64 scene dwindled away to nothing.

Sadly there is nothing of the game from Alan, so its down to Craig Wight to see if he has anything of the game left over.

However, as with the first game, there is a rare MP3 recording of the SID music intented for the game, which can now be downloaded and listened to for the first time. The original SID however could be lost forever. Unless Craig or Nigel have anything of their original C64 disks.

More information required on this title, so hopefully more soon from Alan.

Is it possible to find this title ever again?

One of many unreleased games by Channel 8 Software, Shear Panic differs in that its premise doesn’t seem to be educational. Although we have no information on the game we can guess from the tongue in cheek name that it involved some garden shears and a whole lotta panic.

Whether the game was released and is now lost or was never released at all cannot be proven either way. What is for sure is that it has no entry at all on GB64 or Lemon64.

Hopefully someone connected with Channel 8 Software will one day see these entries on their company and come forward with information, and dare we hope, actually code, screenshots or the game itself. With the total GTWs for Channel 8 Software numbering half a dozen it would be a nice find for the C64. As it is instead we have several rather sparse entries instead!

The question is whether this was a VIC-20 only game, which exists and has been preserved. Hopefully adverts will be able to confirm if there was a C64 edition, or if this is an entry that we can close.

Now was this an official game, or just a quick hack of the original?

It’s very early days yet, but we are wondering if Russ and Ewen were trying to make a quick buck by doing a sequel back in the day, but it was rejected or something.

http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=11744&d=18&h=0

Do you know anything more?

Mentioned in issue June 1986 of Commodore User, this was a game mentioned as coming soon along with 3 Days in Carpathia.

It was described as an authentic ninja adventures and would have been written in The Biro like with 3 Days.

However, it never surfaced and its believed that the game never got past the planning stage.

Do you know any more about this game?….

Shadowkeep is probably up there with the likes of Murder and Daffy Duck for titles that people desperately want to find. It is a game from way back in 1987 time (or approximately) and was an amazing-looking adventure game according to accounts.

One such person, David Stein, remembers clearly of visiting his local game store and seeing the game running on a Commodore 64. The shop keeper demonstrating would not allow anyone to play as it recorded the actions of the player onto the game disk. Apparently the game looked fantastic.

David saved all his money up to buy the game, but sadly by the time he had enough the store had closed down.

What is particularly odd is that this game should have been a high profile release, but it cannot be found anywhere. It is believed that the game did get a release, and may not quite be a GTW. But its a search we are relishing in the hope of bringing it home.

The game has apparently surfaced a few times, including once back in 2001.. but hasn’t been seen since. An Apple II version was also mistaken to be the C64 version, causing hysteria at first. It seems like this is out there, but we just need to find the little git…

Can you help us preserve it?… do you own it?…