Games That Weren't^®

Well this little adventure was done by Andreas König using the ‘Graphic Adventure Creator’. It was judged as average adventure, good for adventure novices.

Not much else is known about the game, apart from that it was reviewed by a German magazine, but the game never surfaced anywhere.

Seen…but released?… does anyone know?

Another brief one which was mentioned in The Games Machine’s news section. This was a budget title coming soon, but we know little more than that.

Thanks to contributor Pablo Freire, we learn that a young developer from Spain called Javier Fáfula had created an isometric explorer game called Rex Hard on the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and MSX and tried to sell the game. The title was a sort of Indiana Jones exploration game, similar perhaps to Indy and the Fate of Atlantis, some years before the 1992 US Gold game.

After releasing the game in Spain in 1987, he managed to get to the UK to try to sell it there as well. Ocean were originally interested, but were no longer once they learnt the game had been sold already in Spain.

In desperate measures, Javier ended up selling the game on the cheap to Hewson, who were likely to release the game on their new Rack-It budget label. However for reasons unknown, the game never saw its UK release. Perhaps they also found out that it had already seen a Spanish release?

But it begs the question therefore if a C64 version ever existed at all? With no C64 version developed by Javier, Hewson would have had to have arranged for a conversion to have been started. It seems though that it never even got to a stage of trying to arrange anything. Maybe we are wrong, and some kind of conversion was started?

Hopefully we’ll learn more from Andrew Hewson in the future.

Yet another game in development for the C64 by Martech, and late into its C64 life. This was a rather special Spectrum game which sadly didn’t recieve the recognition it deserved (although it was flagged up in Retro Gamer magazine recently).

The game is a flip screen platform affair, feeling slightly like Cybernoid from the look of the screenshots, but with you controlling a wolf/hog like character with a gun.

The game is split into two parts, starting in the Mines, and then proceding onto a huge tower level to get to the end of the game. Overall it was very playable, well recieved but not really recognised too much over the years to come like other games.

I can’t say the C64 conversion was highly anticipated, but it was advertised and looked a rather nice title to look forward to. Was “The Light” behind the C64 conversion as well as the other versions?

Many of the guys interviewed as research knew nothing of the C64 game. Michael Archer (who did C64 based work) confirmed that he had left Martech before Rex had begun development.

In 2014 – Graeme Mason got in touch with Dave Martin from Martech, who confirmed pretty much that the game was never really started – although advertised. After getting the Spectrum edition out, Martech’s focus went straight onto the Atari ST and Amiga platforms and moved away from the 8-bits. Martech got very occupied with two new studios that they had set up recently. They would have loved to have seen a C64 edition, but Creative Reality didn’t take it on and only took care of Z80 versions.

It means that it is very likely that the game was never started for the C64 and we will likely never find anything of a conversion. Unless someone steps forward out of the blue – this is it i’m afraid!

For more details on Martech and their story – look out for issue 133 of Retro Gamer magazine for the full feature written by Graeme Mason.

Case closed!

A slightly different GTW this time, with us looking for a magazine listing from BigK magazine. The BigK magazine only ran for 12 issues and from issue 8 to issue 12, for the listings they had in their magazine, they also included a tape covers page where you could cutout a cover for the tape that you saved the listing on.

One of the covers was for a game called "Revenge of the Mutant Pepper Pots", but although advertised, BigK didn’t seem to last long enough for the game to ever surface in later issues. The game was never listed in any of the magazines earlier.

We are unsure who wrote the game, but would be interested to find out if it is still out there somewhere.

It’s very likely that it could just be down to finding the programmer who may have a print out or the game on disk somewhere.

We dont know exactly what the game was about… it could well have been a space invaders clone, or maybe a Pssst clone. Who knows?… Do you?

Much more research needed for this one!

Renegade was was an attempt to push the Robotron style of multi-directional shoot-’em-up into more advanced territory, and on the C64 in particular!

The game was to borrow heavily from the movie Aliens. It featured interconnected rooms filled with eggs, with hatching aliens attacking the player from all directions. It was very similar to Smash TV and Alien Breed, both of which appeared a couple of years later, and graphically pretty impressive – not least because it featured huge numbers of sprites on screen at once.

Unfortunately Clifford was really getting bored with programming by this point in time and so Renegade, along with a Dungeons & Dragons style game he’d also spent a few weeks developing, got left on the shelf. (Ironically he re-entered the industry in the mid-’90s after a stint in computer journalism and now works as a programmer at Microsoft’s Rare studios.)

The game never had a publisher confirmed – it was a case of writing the game first and then trying to find a publisher. As for the game itself, sadly there is nothing remaining any longer. The C64 disks with the data are long gone. It would have been fun to compare to Alien Breed. Although Alien Breed had a top down view, the Ramshaw’s game would have had a semi-3D view point (i.e above and down) on a humble C64.

A sad end to what seems an impressive game… case closed…