Games That Weren't^®

Another obscure one, this time by a company called SSoft (Never heard of them!). This one was reviewed in Home Computer Weekly, and was an adventure put on sale to raise money for cat leukemia.

We originally thought that the reason it might be very hard to find (if released at all) was because it was only advertised in cat enthusiasts’ magazines according to the HCW review, though contributor Gareth Pitchford has found an advert from Popular Computing Weekly (vol. 3 n 49, pg 24).

It’s revealed that the game was also available for the ZX Spectrum and also reviewed – though this version is sadly at large too. We think both versions were released, but just had a very limited distribution due to being mail-order only.

For the game itself – the idea of the adventure is that it is the day of the Cat Show and your beloved animal, called Pest, is missing. You basically have to find him, catch him and get him safely to the show. Everything was built in The Quill.

It got a good score overall and was on sale for around £2.95. Did you buy it for either format, and therefore can you help us preserve it?

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

Information on Shove Off was a bit scarce, as all we knew was that this game was to be a 100 level puzzle game starring Biff, who was a character in an adventure game of the same name.

But step forward Jonathan Cauldwell who tells more….

Shove Off is was a simple Soko-ban type of game with one or two additions and 100 levels. It got released in various forms on the ZX Spectrum, but there are roots to a C64 release…

Actually, Shove Off isn’t the original title of this game – but it was initially going to be called ‘Pushover’ The game was first written on the ZX Spectrum in 1990 by Jonathan Cauldwell, shortly after his Egghead 2 game and was sent to GTi software, a small budget software house based in Newton Abbot, who Jonathan had met at a computer show in London. Approximate date from a GTi letter which Jonathan still had was 30th October 1990.

Jonathan demoed the game, he was paid an advance and he was shown the cover artwork commissioned (Which Jonathan still has a colour photocopy of somewhere). Unfortunately GTi ran into a few problems and declining sales meant that a Spectrum-only version might not make any money. GTI’s Amstrad programmer mostly programmed in BASIC (As GTi published a lot of football management and strategy games), so a CPC conversion looked unlikely. Then also Ocean Software decided to release a game called Pushover at precisely the wrong time. Despite the game being renamed, GTi decided not to publish it.

It was then the rights reverted back to Jonathan, and the game was sent off to Beyond Belief instead. It was either Jim Smith from Beyond or Tony Lock of GTi who requested a C64 conversion from Jonathan, and Jonathan put an advert in Micro Mart looking for C64 programmers to convert a Spectrum game. Jonathan had a couple of replies, and Jonathan chose a guy called “Eric” (Whom sadly Jonathan cannot recall their surname) who sounded the best candidate.
Eric was sent the game, and with each conversation over the phone – it seemed like he was going fine. Exactly how far Eric got or what was eventually done with the game is anybody’s guess, but with the collapse of GTi and Beyond Belief (We are not sure with which company Eric was developing the conversion for at present), the code was wasted.

According to Jonathan, Eric was from somewhere up north, Yorkshire or possibly Lancashire… but its a very long time ago now. Could be an up hill struggle to determine the full name and get a lead.

With the Spectrum version, Jonathan gave up and sent it to Your Sinclair in 1993, but then they closed down and it still never got published. Eventually the game was put on a compilation pack via mail order, and the game’s rights were picked up by Retro-Soft (So distribution is currently denied).

Well, this is it for now… but Jonathan hopes to dig out the GTi contract for us to get a date and also see if the original Pushover artwork has survived.

Who is Eric?…

Shogoth was to be the first big title from a garage studio in Milano, Italy operated by soon-to-be game journalists Fabio Rossi (editor of the Italian editions of Zzap!, The Games Machine and CVG, among others) and Stefano Giorgi (reviewer in the same magazines and last seen working for Compaq in Italy). They had published a few small text adventure games for tape-based magazines, but this was a monster job taking them
around two years to complete.

The concept was to produce an Infocom-style text adventure with the capability of correctly parsing complex commands typed in natural Italian, which as a language is structurally much more complex than English to analyze and interpretate. Also, the double-sided disk game had a complex map of several hundreds locations, making it larger than the three canonical "Zork" games put together. The final, major characteristic was the amount of text involved, filling one whole side of the game disk – a huge quantity at a time when most games actually kept all the text in the RAM along with the game code.

Storywise, Shogoth was about a young man thrown unexpectedly in a weird parallel-dimension world which purposefully negated all the cliches of the sword and sorcery genre, giving it a novel approach somewhat reminding of the style of Douglas Adams’ and Terry Pratchett’s books. In fact, one of the major sources of inspiration were Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes cartoons, with Wile E. Coyote-style traps and oddball characters to meet during the quest. Another source of inspiration was the "Mickey and Goofy in the Ice Sword Trilogy"
series of comic books published by the Italian arm of Disney.

The game was completed and previewed to the staff of the Italian edition of Zzap! magazine, which enthusiastically reviewed it and awarded Shogoth the Gold Medal – the highest possible honour for a game.

Soon after this the game was picked up for publishing by Systems Editoriale, probably the only Italian game publisher actually caring about quality in those days. Then tragedy hit.

The offices of Systems Editoriale where the source code and master copy of Shogoth was kept were destroyed in a fire, and the existing backup copies given to the publisher were never found again. The authors of course had their own copies, but another problem arose. One of them had in fact not the actual game, but a self-playing version created to show the publisher a complete demo and walkthrough – this was obtained substituting a huge part of the practical game code, so backtracking to a complete version was deemed impossible.

The other author had an actual correct copy which was kept safe for some time until the now-redefined Systems Editoriale decided to rethink its publishing schedules in orded to contain the financial damages incurred during the fire – and then sparsely distributed to trusted friends for their personal enjoyment "until a new publisher was found".

Unfortunately the text-only era was coming to a close and the lack of source code didn’t help either. The only printout from which the game could have theoretically be fully retyped didn’t contain the long texts for game locations, descriptions and interactions, and the authors gave up on the whole project.

In the early Nineties, the author’s huge collection of C64 disks among which the only "original" copy of Shogoth lied was stolen along with much more important stuff from his house, so he tried to casually recover at least one of the copies given to friends many years before… with no success.

Given the situation of the Italian game piracy environment, there is a strong possibility that somewhere a lone copy of Shogoth still lies awaiting – and the "antipiracy gimmick" imposed by Systems Editoriale, involving an abstruse key sequence to get the game running (something along the lines of "CTRL + *, followed by SHIFT + &") sure won’t help the one who might find it.

Is this lost forever?…

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?