Games That Weren't^®

A previously unknown title which was dug up thanks to Simon Birrell. His old friend, Patricia Mitchell was programming C64 game called “Save the Hippy” .

The aim of this game was to collect dope from the garden of the hippy. It was mostly a resource management based game where the hippy would grow his own food (including mysteriously leafy plans!) and had to sow and tend to them – harvesting before they died or were nabbed by rabbits.

The main character was made up of two sprites joined up – and the background was flat, with a slight perspective attempt to look like a garden/field.

Patricia never got to finish the game or as a result release it. Patricia later moved to marketing and management and gave up programming altogether. Her first and only game was never to be!

Richard Hewison recently interviewed Patricia in an article for Retro Gamer magazine on Virgin Games, and the following was said:

“Patricia Mitchell joined Virgin Games from Thorn EMI and was originally meant to be one of the first female computer games programmers. She had learned assembler on the Atari 800 and began writing ‘Save the Hippie’ for the Commodore 64.

However, the game was abandoned when Virgin realised that the quality of titles they had released to date were no longer sufficient and they changed tactics and reduced the quantity and significantly upped the quality of their games. This meant that ‘Save the Hippie’ had to be sacrificed and was therefore abandoned. ”

Sadly when asked if the game had potentially survived – Patricia had confirmed that she had moved house a few years ago and had to put things into storage. A massive clear out would have very likely resulted in her one back up of the game to be lost forever.

This sadly will be a title that no-one will get to see unless something miraculous occurs. Case closed!

Before the hits of “Cybernoid”, “Stormlord”, “Smash TV”.. Nick Jones also took part in a C64 conversion of a Speccy title, “SAS Strike Force” for Mikrogen software (http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0004951) back in around 1987. The game was essentially a sideways scrolling run and shoot game, nothing too complex.

It was a relatively faithful conversion that Nick did, though Nick himself thought the game was really rubbish. Most likely down to a poor game being converted in the first place (Certainly the reviews aren’t too great for the Speccy version)

For currently unknown reasons, the game never made it out. 1987 was the last year of Mikrogen releases before Microvalue got hold of most of their old stock. Basically the company folded, and we believe this is what happened to the game (Which we also believe was completed).

All of Nick’s C64 bits are probably at his parents house back in the UK (Where as Nick now lives in the states). Maybe one day Nick may dig out some of his past work to share with the retro world, including this game.  See what Nick has to say about the game in Creator Speaks.

It isn’t known who else was involved on the conversion, so it will be very hard trying to find anything of this title…

An interesting entry, this time a game which never saw the light of day which was being produced by FTL.

FTL was an arcade division of Gargoyle Games, and they got working on their first 3 titles: Shockway Rider, Lightforce and Samurai Dawn.

Now as you can guess, and because you’re reading this very page – Samurai Dawn never quite made it along with the first two. Shockway and Lightforce did on all platforms. But Samurai Dawn never surfaced even on the Spectrum (Following that link will show some advert scans, including some of the cover art)

There doesn’t seem to have been any mention specifically of a C64 version, but we can only assume that there was of somekind due to the C64 releases of their other two titles. But Luther Bhogal-Jones brought up an interesting point that after reading our entry on Thundercats V1, he always thought that the Gargoyle Games’ Thundercats was simply their unreleased FTL game Samurai Dawn, re-skinned for Elite.

What with the sword fighting nature of Thundercats, this could potentially be a good indication of what happened to the game. Elite may have paid Gargoyle to get them a Thundercats game very quickly, and they decided to just reskin the S.D game, thinking they could make a lot more money out of a licensed conversion. We’re not sure yet, but hope to find someone from Gargoyle to confirm. Otherwise we may be looking at a rather different game overall.

Well, we were close – but in 2015, we discovered that Samurai Dawn was likely not to have turned into Thundercats, but Gargoyle’s other game – Wolf, was in fact Thundercats originally. It is still possible that Samurai Dawn turned into Wolf, but it seems unlikely.

Do you know anything about this game?

Samber was a pretty neat Load Runner clone that was produced back in 1997 time by Lepsi, a Polish development company. It was released via Commodore Scene in the UK and sold a few copies to warrent Lepsi wanting to develop a sequel.

News was released that a sequel was being started, initially named Samber 2, but would later be renamed to something else.

Sadly nothing ever appeared and the game was forgotten. Just how far did it get, and was it even started?

We got in touch with Miroslaw Zielinski who tells GTW64 that they had planned to make the sequel, but no production was ever started. However, Sebaloz Borkowski was thinking of starting a retheme of Samber 2 (with a change of graphics and music) and using the Samber 2 name.

The plans never made it into fruition sadly, and a lack of interest was put down as the reason for the game stalling. No sequel therefore was ever to make its way onto the C64 – a shame!

Case closed!

Salvage was a text/graphics adventure based on a redundant convict space shuttle where you must recover the valuable Sequerra Crystal, work out the teleport code and save your life by teleporting off the craft.

There are many problems to overcome and the game would take approximately 5 hours to complete.

Each screen came with a graphical picture and a description – and overall was a nice piece of software by the sounds of it.

Now most of this information came from a review in Home Computer Weekly back in 1985, and the game got a good score overall. There was even a glimpse of the inlay on the cover:

We can confirm that the game was actually released (albeit in a limited form) and a fellow collector has backed up the game and released to the world via CSDB, which you can grab from here (And which there are inlay scans – showing a very different looking inlay!)

http://noname.c64.org/csdb/release/?id=99865

Thanks to Sailor/Triad for the heads up, and Bepp/Triad for his excellent salvaging work! :-)

Case closed!

Saigon Combat Unit is a sideways scrolling game in a similar mould to Green Beret, and was a budget release due from Zeppelin games. A C64 version was actually being developed, and this was confirmed by instructions from the released Spectrum version from the World Of Spectrum website.

We also have credit details for the C64 version, which lists Craig Wight as the developer and graphic artist. Music was being done by Sonic Graffiti, so likely to have been done by Gerard Gourley – sadly nothing in HVSC which resembles the Spectrum tunes also done by Sonic Graffiti.

The game got a mixed reception on both the Spectrum and Amstrad, but still this would be good to try and find and recover. What exactly happened to the C64 conversion? Did Craig hit any problems?

We hope to find out more soon!

One major category of GTWs is "Games That Were, but not on the C64". In this case, ST and Amiga versions were released, but despite being announced (referenced in the January 1990 issue of Computer Action magazine) as forthcoming for C64, Amstrad and Spectrum, no 8-bit versions were released.

Safari Guns (known as On Safari in some countries) from New Deal was essentially an Operation Wolf game in a different context. It involves travelling through a safari route in Africa, taking photographs of endangered animals whilst also shooting poachers, and herein may lie the reason for the cancellation.

The game was designed to be played with a mouse, using one button to use the camera and the other to use the gun. This would not translate easily to joystick or keyboard, and this may be why no 8-bit versions were released (even for the Amstrad, the most popular system in Infogrames’ native France, and thus the system with the most French games).

However, this is all hypothesis. With no credits, it may be a tricky one to chase up. Dominico Manfredi, Matthieu Hofseth and Elie Daniel are credited on http://hol.abime.net/1829 with the Amiga game, and may be able to tell ussomething.

Was anything ever started?…

Sabian Island seems to be yet another game that was advertised to buy through mail order from a software company, without actually having ever being released. I don’t know how many games were ‘released’ as such in the 1980s but it certainly provides Games That Weren’t a rich vein of material to search through!

In the game you recover a missing ‘time device’ to save New York from destruction. The cover shows a man in front of an island, holding a gun aloft above his head, while behind the island a nuclear explosion can be seen, which also sums up the plot of the game pretty well!

The game was due for a multi-format release but seemed that it didn’t make its way onto the market for the CPC, Spectrum or C64 for whatever reasons. Presumably it reached far enough into its development for Skyslip software to put out an advertisement for it.

The advertisement also shows other games that don’t seem to have been released so I do wonder if the company suffered a sudden collapse or was bought out by another company who quickly scrapped all the planned games and moved the programmers onto other projects.

A review of the text adventure game A Simple Case of Espionage for the Spectrum by Crash Magazine states that Skyslip were a new software house created by Rock City Music, who at the time were a leading music distributor. Whether Rock City Music were/are connected with the famous Nottingham rock club ‘Rock City’ is unknown but the striking similarity in their names suggests its possible.

Looking across other platforms, it seemed Skyslip never managed to release anything on the CPC, though there was an entry for Sabian Island on CPC Zone, which states the release date as N/A. On the Spectrum they released three games, two of which are currently MIA on World of Spectrum, which fits in with the scarcity or non-existence of so many of their other games. On the C64, according to GB64 and Lemon64, they also released nothing.

Thanks to Fabrizio Bartoloni in March 2023, we have learnt that the Amstrad CPC edition did at least manage to sneak out and you can check a video of it in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg9Rc9wlvmI

A top down game which seems like Ikari Warriors mixed with Into the Eagle’s Nest. It is created by Jason Falcus, who did a number of games for companies like Codemasters. We are trying to get in touch with him to see if we can learn more about the game and potentially other conversions for C64 and ZX Spectrum.

If you know anything more, please do get in touch!