Games That Weren't^®

Phil Nicolson was one of the heroes of the C64 with his last ditch efforts to bring new software to the C64 in the mid 90’s, as Commodore Format was walking slowly off into the sunset. Great titles such as Deadline and Tracer were created for Visualise Software, and he even took over the software company as Jon Wells moved onto his Supportware scheme.

On buying Deadline from Visualise all those years ago (A brilliant purchase at £3), I found an additional preview called “Portal”… A clone of the Simon Pick game “Revolution” from Power Pack 1.

Although in the early stages, with sprites ripped from Deadline for testing purposes, the game actually looked and played reasonably well. Could this have gone one better over “Revolution”?

Sadly, this was all that was ever seen of the game, even though a release was planned in the next few months. Phil moved away from the C64 scene, quite likely after poor sales, which many suffered with at the time.

Phil got in touch via Twitter in 2021, and explains that he took some magazine articles of his games and demos to show at a University interview. He was offered a place and never touched the C64 again after that. Portal essentially never progressed any further than the demo you see here.

This means that Portal is very much a case closed. This is it – so check it out for yourself to see what could have been.

Populous was a groundbreaking game from the mind of Peter Molyneux, which was still around the time that the C64 was going strong still.  Of course, it posed the question of whether a C64 conversion would be on the cards.  A Master System conversion happened though, which frustrated us – but we moved on without nothing penned in.

In the UK at least, news of a conversion was non-existant, but 64’er in Germany had surprised its readers by printing screenshots of what looked like a working demo.  They had stated that the magazine received a demo-disk which included a demo of a c64-version of the god-sim Populous by Peter Molyneux.

The demo-disk included the first graphics and routines for this game, indicating that the scan shots were in fact real and interactive.  The last thing the magazine stated is that they will try to contact the programming team and give them some-sort of legal protection (“Schutzenhilfe”), and follow the development of the game.

It wasn’t known how things went with the game, and if 64’er got hold of the game. It looks unlikely due to nothing being released (and the coder later all but confirmed that no-one got in touch with them), but all we had for a while were screenshots from the magazine.

Zeldin informed GTW that the guys who made the early screens, did the game “Boom”. After the unsuccessful launch of “Boom”, they sent Zeldin and his crew all their started projects and said: “Finish it if you want!”. On those disks were the “Populous” graphics, and also the source codes.

Coder, Frank Hugenroth, got in touch with GTW64 in 2015 and confirmed that it was created more as a technical demo for the C64 and was contributed initially as a contribution to an animation/GFX competition to 64’er.

Frank mentioned that they pitched the potential conversion to EA Germany, but they sadly declined it (feeling that the market had moved on from the C64).   In the end, the demo initially created was done just for fun, but has a working grid of 64×64 and can be scrolled.  It’s suggested that after EA’s rejection, they did think about using the technique with another game – but it was never to be.

Well, one of the AWT members in 2015 – LightSide came to the rescue of GTW64 and has supplied us with the disk which Frank and Andre originally had sent over.  Which includes the source code.  This includes an interactive title page and a map which can be moved around rather impressively.  There is also a tune separately which was not integrated, and is pretty impressive.

Frank has given full permission also for the source code to be released.  The source code is credited to both Frank and Andre.  It is released under the Creative Commons license Attribution as detailed by Frank:

“This material is licensed under the Creative Commons license Attribution – Noncommercial – Share Alike 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.”

Separate from this version of Populous, we can confirm also that an official C64 version was in the pipeline!… Paul Hughes had the following to say…

“Its only a tidbit – I’m not sure how far that version of Populous actually went, but when I was in first talks with Pete and Les at Bullfrog about Flood 2 – they asked me (circa 1991) if I’d be interested in doing a 64 conversion of Pete’s Populous (having just left Ocean and having a raft of 64 routines still fresh in my mind).

As I got more and more “into” flood 2 and pushing the Atari ST, the thoughts of doing more 64 work where the furthest from my mind. I don’t think they ever got much further, and just afterwards they did a massive selling Megadrive port of Populous and it all fizzled away.”

So did they get someone else to do the port?… Is this the port?…. More info needed, but a very interesting snippet of information there…

But for now, check out what could have been the real deal had EA Germany signed it up!  A massive shame it never got further, but so glad it has been fully saved!

Around the same time that MOOD made a big impression with C64 sceners in 1996/97, Attila Pohorai (Coding and level graphics) and Viktor Varga (Intro code and graphics) put together a preview which would get many fanatical game’s players excited, including the C64 crowd.

Even though the classic Prince Of Persia was converted to almost every format in existence, the C64 version for some unknown reason was missed out. Sad, because every version that came out was a huge hit. It’s unknown actually if the C64 did have an official version in the planning stages, though the non existence of a C64 conversion was about to be rectified.

A series of stills were released as a slideshow preview, showing various screens of the game on the C64. It was just impressive to see the game making some kind of form on our beloved breadbin, but behind the hype it seems that Prince Of Persia looked a little off colour and plain with its shades of cyan and blue.

And even though a lot of screens were in the preview, there was no main character to look at, or any action whatsoever… just some stills and a good conversion of the game’s Arabian tune. Once the excitement died down, so did any sign of more news of the game. The guy behind the graphics contacted GTW and mentioned that the game hadn’t been scrapped, but no more has since been heard and it seems as P.O.P had finally been stopped.

It is not known how far the game ever reached, and even if the main character was present and running around, just like the original game. Hopefully contact with Viktor will help us find out some more, and even see some glimpses of what had been done.

In total there have been 3 attempts on converting Prince of Persia – one unofficial and two official. Including this entry, you can read about all 3 within GTW64. However, in late 2011 – Mr Sid completed an impressive unofficial conversion of the game in Easy Flash format which you can checkout here: http://www.rgcd.co.uk/2011/10/prince-of-persia-c64.html