Games That Weren't^®

Yet another Ocean title which seems to have got lost along the way from its translation from other formats. In particular from the Spectrum/Amstrad in this case.

Phantom Club was a Knightlore style game from the creator of MOVIE, another game which never quite made a C64 translation. The difference with Movie however was that this game seems to have been penned for a C64 release and was mentioned a few times in a few magazines from 1988. The ACE magazine review lists the C64 as a format for its release, and the advert as well confirms this. See scans below!

The following portion of the games eventual review (from a Spectrum magazine) defines the game as follows:

“You have to be careful which clubs you join these days. Phantom Club is not a club to be recommended in more ways than one. Plutus, our hero, joined up and before he knew it, all the other members – a bunch of superheroes – had fallen under the evil influence of their wicked leader, leaving Plutus to restore order by reaching the rank of Ipsisimus. For good to triumph over evil he has to complete ten perilous missions in the Phantom Club HQ. (Should have joined the Kit- Kat Club Ed)

The game opens to a rather rough rendition of The Antiques Road Show theme tune (Two million pounds? But I only paid 50p for it! Ed) and then you get a touch of Deja vu. The highly detailed Filmation-type graphics will remind you of Movie because both games were written by the same chap. The graphics are definitely the strong point and judging by the sheer quantity of different sprites, objects and backgrounds, they must occupy vast amounts of memory.

But your task is pretty awesome, if not tedious. To begin one of the missions you’ve got to knock up at least 40,000 points by shooting super-heroes and picking up bonuses, but as each baddy only collects 50 points when dead, it might take you ’til Xmas next year. The trouble with Phantom Club is that once you’ve been everywhere and done everything there isn’t much left to tickle your fancy. You can while away the time by filling baddies with psychic bolts or drawing maps (there are over 550 rooms) but the novelty soon wears off.

If you want a lot of chocolate on your biccies, don’t join this club.”

Overall, this doesn’t paint a very pretty picture for the game, and with it being a relatively unknown title, it might not be worth a huge search. However, it is lost.. we lack information on it, and we’d like to preserve it. If Cisco Heat was lost, we’d preserve that… and that WAS shite.

Do you know anything about this title? Can you confirm its existence?

Yet another unreleased Codemasters game! … But this time from early on in their life in 1987. Phantomas was to be a conversion of the released spectrum game where you control a robber in a Manic Miner/Dizzy kind of game.

The game saw a sequel released, which oddly Codemasters released under a different name of “Vampire”, and which saw release on the C64. Perhaps it was renamed because the C64 edition hadn’t been released, or just to tie in as a horror themed game. What is odd is that the Phantomas 2 release in Spain has the same Vampire sprite, but the ZX Spectrum release of Phantomas 2 has the original character.

This original first game conversion however was being completed by Mark Greenshields, who previously developed the excellent Split Personalities, and worked on the mixed received 19 Boot Camp.

According to Darren Melbourne, the conversion was very faithful, and was actually completed! So why did Codemasters choose not to release this faithful conversion? Bizarrely, Darren says the finger points to the fact that it was too much of an exact Spectrum clone, without any upgrades to take advantage of the C64 hardware. For this reason it was canned.

Yes… one word springs to mind… Dizzy… but alas… this was seen differently.

Mark suggested that he wasn’t paid for the work, so never got the final game. It’s believed that the original game didn’t sell very well and for that reason Codemasters decided to ditch the game.

Can this ever be found for GTW? Mark offers hope that he may still have it, but its unlikely.

Pengwyn has all the indications that its a poor man’s Pengo clone, and the C64 certainly had plenty of these :)

Postern was to jump on the bandwagon with their own clone, and the game was mentioned in various adverts. However it seems to have gone missing, and nothing has ever been seen of the game.

It’s possible that Postern went down before the game could get a release, or they saw there was too many Pengo clones and decided to not release the game.

The question is – how far did the game get before it was cancelled and can it be found? … It’s quite an old game, so any remaining disks might be deterioating. Might be one that we need to find quickly if it does exist.

Do you know anything more?…

Pegasus and the Trials of Perseus was yet another early C64 game that got some heavy advertising, but never seemed to quite make it for reasons unknown yet. There were various adverts in magazines at the time, and even a review!

As described by the review (if it was indeed a review at all – see the scans and the same matching screenshot as the advert), the game puts you in search of the treasures of the gods. You have the favor of Olympus as you ride Pegasus, the great winged stallion. On your steed, you soar skyward to perform heroic deeds. Following the riddled advice of Zeus, you then fly over the rolling hills of Greece towards the temples of the Titans. When you dismount, sword in hand you must fight Cyclops, Medusa and the Centaur.

The game also had speech synthesis throughout and various 3D effects and looked pretty good in its single static screenshot.

So what happened to the game?…. we aren’t quite sure, but Tymac did release a few titles for the C64. Maybe they went bust just before it got a release?

Do you know more?

Pegasus had its beginnings in the basement of a kebab shop in Gravesend in Kent, where Chris Neary, who had done the graphics for The Evil Dead in 1983, along with Duncan Rigden and Stuart Brown, got together to make ‘the best game ever’.

The concept centred on a Wizard who transformed into a Pegasus to fly across a landscape, while being grounded when in Wizard form. When you were in your Wizard form you could enter houses and descend into an Underworld.

Sadly Stuart didn’t have the same enthusiasm for the project as Chris and Duncan and when he left the project faltered, until it was shelved and the programmers went on to other things.

The most interesting thing to come out of the project is the fact that a very similar concept was released by Palace Software, who Chris had worked for before starting Pegasus, that went on to become a huge seller and a classic of the 80s 8-bit home computer scene. It’s name? Cauldron.

Cauldron features a witch, who flies on a broom or is grounded in a similar way to the Wizard in Pegasus. The fact that some of the graphics Chris made for Halloween, another Game That Wasn’t, were reworked for Cauldron without his knowing adds to the mystery.

That said however, if Chris had already left Palace by the time Pegasus was conceived it’s hard to see how they could have stolen his idea, but the similarities are thought provoking.

Sadly for us though, it seems nothing remains of Pegasus for us to judge for ourselves the similarities, unless Stuart Brown has some code or Duncan Rigden, the artist for the project, has some archived concept art.

Do you know any more about this game?…

Paranoid Pete is a space harvesting action game which was released on the Spectrum way back in 1984. Personal Computer Games advertised the game and clearly you can see that a Commodore 64 version was in the pipeline.

Although the ZX Spectrum , and BBC micro versions did surface and get a release, the C64 version never quite made it due to Ubik going under due to all the problems that occurred. Hedning recently found the reason why in Popular Computing Weekly 6-12 Sept 1984:

“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.”

So shortly after being released on the shelves, Ubik were ordered to stop selling the game. Was the C64 version even in production when Ubik were told to stop?

Rob Hubbard in a video interview once mentioned that he programmed a game which featured the Weetabix character, which the company didn’t get permission to use and hence the game was scrapped.

Considering that Rob also coded a game called Razzmatazz, and that Ubik were based in Tyneside … it was originally certain that Rob Hubbard was behind the C64 conversion of this game. However, it was later confirmed that Rob had worked on Paranoid Pete 2, which later turned into Razzmatazz after the Weetabix legal issues. This is why Rob recalls doing a game with the character at the start, but this was changed to a strawberry with legs.

So, although we thought Rob was involved in the original game – it seems he wasn’t. There is a possibility that his Casio tune was to be used for the game, but that is to be confirmed or removed as a reference in HVSC.

We know that a C64 version was in the planning for the first game at least, as an advert from Popular Computing Weekly clearly has the format listed. We may have to find someone from Ubik or another developer who may have something of the game, but it is looking bleak. At the very least, the tunes seem to have been saved!

However – Anonymous Contributor makes a very good point that in the advert it states “Amstrad version available September”, but there is no such claim for the C64 edition. This gives the impression that the C64 version may have already been ready and on sale? Did it therefore sneak out before the clamp down from Weetabix?