Games That Weren't^®

It is believed that Records File is a data analysis program for Football Director. The Spectrum version can be found at http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0015592

This may mean it is not a game as such that we are looking for, but an extension to the Football Director game that exists. This seems to be at large for the C64 platform, and hence is another title we need to get searching for.

Do you know anything about this?

Our next entry, Rebel Star 2 is a bit of an odd one as the first game never even got released on the C64 either. But sure enough the sequel was advertised by Silverbird in Zzap issue 44.

After contacting Richard Hewison from The Bird Sanctuary website, he confirmed that they mostly released adverts which never rang actually true. So it seemed that this was purely vapourware.

Thanks to @C64Takeaway, we have had confirmation from Julian Gollop himself to say that the C64 version never existed. So it seemed Richard was right!

BUT – a twist in the tale – as Dave Korn confirmed in 2015 that he definately converted Rebelstar 2 to the C64. He is very certain that the game was never actually canned, but although he completed the port – Telecomsoft was sold off and shut down before it could be published.

This certainly the case as Silverbird ceased to be! So we now have a full game to try and find, and Dave is hopeful that he may be able to find it some day in his attic.

The game was ported across directly from the Spectrum to the C64, which you can read more about soon hopefully if Dave gives permission. It roughly took only a day to get the majority converted, and maybe a few more for tidy ups!

Watch this space!

Jullian Gollup’s classic budget tactical combat was very well recieved. The budget game was an improved re-release of Rebelstar Raiders and pleased pretty much everyone at the time. It was pretty much Spectrum/Amstrad only and C64 users sadly didn’t get a conversion.

But hold on… Danish magazine Soft in February 1987 then go along and publish an advert for Firebird releases, which includes a C64 based inlay for Rebelstar! The game was being sold along with other Firebird releases like Thrust and Harvey Headbanger from Super Soft, a game importing company from Denmark. The price was 39,95 DKR, which equalled around £3 at that time.

After some investigation we couldn’t find any leads to back this scan up, but then GTW by chance got chatting to Dave (Ubik) Korn and asked him about any games he worked on that never saw the light of day. Dave mentioned he worked on a C64 conversion of a popular Jullian Gollup game for the budget label that got canned fairly early on for reasons currently unknown. An ACE magazine review in issue 3 also confirmed a C64 version in its release list (see scans)

But in 2015, Dave confirmed that it was infact the sequel that he was involved in – so we still know very little now about who was behind the first game. Do you know anything more?

An early educational game aimed at young kids. Razzmatazz featured a sickly cute strawberry on legs and was surprisingly done by none-other than Rob Hubbard during his early C64 days, before music became his main source of income – where we were delighted by compositions such as Thing on a Spring and Monty on the Run.

In a conversation way back at BIT LIVE Brighton 2003, Rob confirmed that the game was finished. He informed GTW that the company closed its doors just as he had completed it. Sadly, Rob came out of it with no money at all and a low point at the start of his career.

So what was it like as a game?… Well, Rob lovingly told us “You really want to know about Razzmatazz?, Well I can tell you… It was f**king crap!!”. Was it really that bad? We had had to try and find out out for ourselves of course!

In 2013 (almost exactly 10 years after the BIT5 event), we caught up with Rob once more at the Play Expo in Manchester, where he recalled a bit more about the game. One of the screens was apparently based on a pirate ship, with another screen based on a Escher-style staircase.

What you had to do is still unknown, but this was a little more about the game than we knew before. We assume that there was some kind of element of having to “collect stuff” to progress onto the next screen. Perhaps almost Manic Miner like, which was typical of that time.

In an “Musician’s Ball” article in August 1986 of Zzap-64, it becomes clear that journalist Gary Penn had actually played it and described the game with the “Strawberry with legs” reference. Also, he mentioned about a rendition of Blue Monday playing, where the player is asked to pick an object. Another recollection was about you guiding a strawberry up a stairway – which could be the Escher-style staircase that Rob referred to in 2013.

Originally, Rob had offered the possibility that he still had the game on a tape somewhere in his collection. After some negotiations with gaming historian Mat Allen, Rob searched and tried to find the tape, though sadly couldn’t find any trace of the game at all.

However, there will always be a possibility that its out there somewhere, but the only remaining element of the game so far is the music, which we will come onto a bit further on.

In 2011, thanks to some fantastic research work by Hedning/Genesis Project, there were reports that the game was to be a licenced game based on the ITV childrens show of the very same name . Hedning found the reason why:

“Weetabix acts against Ubik

TYNESIDE company Ubik’s game Paranoid Pete will not now be appearing in the shops. Weetabix complained that the characters portrayed in the game resembled its own ‘Weetabix men’ used in advertising too closely.

When we first started work on Paranoid Pete we were working in collusion with Weetabix to produce a game based on their characters,” said Ubik’s marketing director Danielle Allan. “But when the game was complete, Weetabix weren’t happy with the result. In order to be able to bring out a game ourselves, we changed many aspects of it, but Weetabix were not satisfied and it has now been shelved. However, Ubik do have two more games scheduled for release in October. Razzmatazz is based on the ITV children’s programme of the same name, to be brought out under licence on the Spectrum, with a Commodore 64 version to follow, and a comical game for the BBC provisionally entitled The Professor. Both are expected to be priced around £5.95“

Popular Computing Weekly 6-12 Sept 1984

So the game was to be published by Ubik software (A Tyneside based company – where Rob was based), who got caught up with a spot of bother with their Paranoid Pete game (of which we also have a GTW entry on) – pulled from the shelves because of its Weetabix main character being unofficially used. It seems that this probably killed Ubik off, after all the advertising that had been paid for and mastering costs. They were meant to be making modifications to the main character, but this never happened.

With links now made to Ubik, there was a chance that something could be found. However, initial searches for those involved have proved fruitless. C64 Audio’s Chris Abbott, who has been putting together Project Hubbard, also enquired with Gary Penn about if he still had anything of the game. Gary doesn’t believe he has anything, but hopefully some day we may be surprised.

How did Gary come to have a copy of the game? Well, Gary and his friends had been trying to make their own software company, and had been corresponding with various companies. Many of which had sent copies through to Gary and his friends, which somehow included a copy of Razzmatazz. Was this from Ubik perhaps?

Interestingly, in October 2021, Rob Hubbard revealed to Chris Abbott that he believed Paranoid Pete actually evolved into Razzmatazz after the legal issues with the original game. However, in March 2022, Rob corrected himself and that Razzmatazz was in fact originally to be Paranoid Pete 2, a platformer sequel to the original game and which he was originally requested to do for the company.

When the Weetabix licencing issues occurred, they ditched the Paranoid Pete theme completely and decided to go down the licenced route with the ITV show. The main sprite was changed from the Weetabix character to a Strawberry, but the rest of the sprites remained. Ubik collapsed before the game could be released.

So if you want to imagine how the main game character looked – I’d imagine it was just the same basic shape of the Weetabix character, but tweaked into a strawberry shape with a colour change.

Chris Abbott needed to take the research many steps further overall, as part of research for Project Hubbard and the “Rob Hubbard – Master of Magic” book about Rob’s SID work over the years. So, we did a bit of digging and investigational work with Chris, which helped to reveal a few extras. Much of the findings below about the music itself would be down to Chris’ excellent detective work.

Chris found that Rob had created his own development tools for the game, and when Ubik were to collapse – they told Rob that they weren’t going to be able to take his game on. The game was still Rob’s, but he was discouraged from trying to sell to others. He was told that the game was crap, but the music was good – which led to Rob going fully down that route instead.

Rob instead took the music, and along with a series of other tunes, packaged everything up into a demo that was sent out everywhere called “Commodore 64 Music Examples”. Within the demo are “Pop Tunes”, which were all intended for use within the game – possibly for each level with some others used in cut scenes/menus.

What is particularly interesting is “Song 13” from the SID, which is a direct cover of a later edition of the Razzmatazz theme tune which you can hear here. Overall it seems that Songs 5-15 are all intended for the game.

This is so far all that remains and there is feeling that the game itself may never be found – unless someone like Gary or one of his friends happens to turn up a box of disks. Strange things can happen, and it would be another piece of Rob Hubbard history saved if it can be found.

Microprose were the kings of simulation, and Airbourne Ranger was another fine example of their brilliance back in the day.

So you won’t be surprised to learn that a sequel was in development… Well, Ratpack was just that, and was being developed by Carl Wade (Gemini Wing, Double Dragon and Stratego programmer) and David Wightman on the C64. David was main programmer on the Amiga/ST, with Scott Walsh on PC.

The game was in development for roughly a year and was fully playable on most of the platforms. David suggests 80% complete on most platforms. There was some pretty neat A.I throughout, you could control 4 teams and pre-script them to walk, wait, attack, stealth, blow-up and more. You could watch the game as an observer with your commands taking place, or jump in and take over a team and play Commando/Arcade style.

Barry Leitch composed the music for the game, or at least the loading music which can be found in HVSC. Because it is the loading tune, it seems there might have been a fair bit of a game produced for any need for music being produced. There however seems to be no in-game tunes anywhere as of yet. David offers hope by having more of Barry’s music on ST drives.

The C64 version was shaping up pretty nicely, but sadly the entire game across all formats was canned due to internal politics between Publisher and Management. In 1992, a quiet sequel to Airbourne Ranger did surface in the form of Special Forces on the Amiga… http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php?id=1591 which was from a new team and done with a completely new codebase.

David suggests that the Amiga/ST versions still exist with most of the artwork, but we are yet to find out about the C64 version. Sadly Carl Wade passed away in 2011 at the young age of 40, so it will be down to hopefully finding someone who may have had a copy of the game running. It could be that this one is lost forever.

So the search begins – can anything of this game be found? Maybe more of the game’s documentation? Watch this space.

A very brief entry for a title which was mentioned in Commodore Format news back in 1992.

This was to be a new range of educational software such as:

Shapes and Colours
First Letters

Overall trying to follow in the footsteps of Fun School, but maybe too late in the day? …. Nothing ever surfaced of any of the games.

The prices were quoted as £5.99 on tape and £6.99 on disk. However, very often educational titles sold in very small numbers – so could this have been released but had poor distribution?

Do you know any more about this one?