Games That Weren't^®

The sequel to First Samurai was to be programmed by Vivid Image’s sister division known as MirrorSoft, straight after the first game was released.

The people who were intended for the conversion were Mat Sneap and Jon Williams.

The C64 was starting to lose support quick at the time, and as First Samurai was quite late in the C64’s life, the sequel was only merely a planned idea, which was scrapped as the C64 market declined.

The game was completed on other platforms, but the C64 sadly never had a version started in the end, therefore making it impossible for GTW to try and locate anything of it.

Mat Sneap has recently confirmed that the game ceased to exist, and he had no involvement in it either. So there we have it… another one bites the dust.

Case closed…

Another title highlighted thanks to Peter Weighill. This early 1983 Epyx game was advertised in quite a few magazines at the time as part of a double pack with Gun Fight. Unfortunately this one never got to see the light of day, even though the other game pack with Starfire and Fire One were released.

Sea Wolf 2 was an arcade sequel by Bally Midway, which sees you trying to sink as many boats as you can whilst avoiding mines. Very simple affair, which was slightly dated even by 1983.

The advert used never specified any formats, but it was found that the pack of games was released on the Atari platform, and an Epyx brochure states that it was for the Atari only, with no mention of the Commodore platform. So why are we including it?

Well, we believe that it is very possible that Seawolf 2 could have been caught up due to Commodore publishing the first game on its cartridge. It’s possible that Epyx couldn’t get the licence on the C64, so abandoned the double pack. If this can be proven, it is possible that something may have been started on both games.

Very early days, and we could get confirmation soon – but another one to try and solve!

Well, nowadays you’ve got people going on about how GTA 3 is full of bad taste with the ability to have sex with prostitutes and then kill them. It’s however not something limited to games of today, but this kind of thing was going on as early as in the 80’s

Bad Taste Software wanted to do something a bit daring and different to the usual run of the mill games, and wished to push the boundaries a bit with some funny games.

The most well known was Di’s Baby, which got slated and eventually banned… But another game was in production called “Seal Cull” which had you battering Seals to earn points. I’m sure many animal activists were delighted to hear the news of this game.

Surfice to say, Seal Cull has not made an appearance since it was mentioned in various magazines (Including a rumoured review in Your Commodore). It’s last mention was in a C64 Guide magazine in 1990 (Along with Virus by Firebird). Did the game get a release therefore?

Well, we got hold of the chap behind Bad Taste Software, and Seal Cull wasn’t actually one of their games – though it did inspire them to make a re-creation of the game! http://www.badtastesoftware.co.uk/SealCull.html

No, it seems that Seal Cull was part of a series of games to be released by a company called HardSoft, along with two other games called Aids Attack and Motorway Maniac. It was all a hoax though drummed up by Commodore Horizon’s Chris Jenkins, and exposed by Commodore User magazine. No games were ever actually started!

Next we hope to find the original article which was ran for April Fools, but it is pretty much a case closed with no titles to find!

Scooter was one of a few titles advertised by Electric Dreams back in issue 8 of Zzap 64 games. Nuclear Nick was to be part of a double pack with a game called Scooter.

It never quite surfaced, but after a bit of digging – we find that the game was released by Americana Software on the Atari

The game looks very much like The Scrolls of Abadon, which was released on the C64 by Americana. This suggests that Frank Cohen was the developer. Thanks to Paul Morrison, we learn that it was also advertised as being released for the C64 by Americana software as well in Zzap issue 10 (see scans).

Both Americana and Electric Dreams have the same address, suggesting that they hastily renamed the label to Americana – perhaps because the Electric Dreams label had already been taken by Activision?

Art Huff confirmed he had no involvement in the game. Early days, but at least we can play something of the game on the Atari for now. Surely the C64 edition must have been started, and even finished? So why not released?

Ron Rosen got in touch in December 2022, and we checked if he knew anything about the game. Firstly he confirmed that it wasn’t his, so it seems likely that Frank did the C64 version too.

SAW Wars was a tongue in cheek game written by Ben Hayes before his days at Enigma Variations.

Ben described things in an interview as follows:

"Sort of a right to left shoot-em-down thing. There was a point to the game, in that you had to get through the various attack waves in order to drop a bomb on the offices of Stock Aitken and Waterman (this was 1989 remember … Rick Astley, Jason Donovan etc).

The sprites were all robbed, the other graphics were crap, the music was robbed and there were only about 6 attack patters. Thrilling stuff…. and it took about 20 minutes of tedium to reach the end. You could freeze it with an AR and alter the wave number with the screen editor, so at least you could see the end part easily!"

Ben later added when contacted in 2011:

"S.A.W. Wars was really nothing more than a load of nicked sprites, a character starfield and some ludicrous premise about blowing up "The Hit Factory" in a sideways shooter style. No terrain, no intelligent characters, no SFX… Nothing remotely worth mentioning, frankly. I think it was just me trying to work out how collision detection worked. People on Compunet would put up with anything back then, ‘cos there was nothing good around anyway."

An interesting sounding hacked game which unfortunately may never be found. You see, Ben lost all his disks in a flood many years back and this meant the likes of all his Kick Off 2 work was never to be found. The only chance of ever finding this one is if Ben had passed a copy to someone else.
Is this a game you can recall?…. is it hidden in your disk collection?

Could be a very quick and simple open and shut case for this one!