Games That Weren't^®

Another pacman clone, with a imaginative title of "Pacman X" :)..

A fairly early preview, as the game is not 100% playable.

The game is slightly modernised from the original Pacman, but not by too much. The graphics are still quite simplistic, and very green looking overall.

There doesn’t seem to be a great deal more to offer than the old concept.

There are plenty of credits within this preview, including Mikael Backlund, who has helped GTW in the past. Hopefully he will be able to help with enquires into this game.

One to hope finding in the future….

This was a bi-directional SEU with some nice graphics by Simon Probert (Simes of Cosine, currently in Australia) and code by Jason Kelk with no sound, although Simon was to do this.

The game progressed from some early code by Jason, whom is most famous for his work now with Cosine, and his Reaxion games.

The game was being developed for Firebird and their budget range, after someone at the company showed interest after seeing the previews they sent.

When a more complete preview was sent up, Firebird were not really interested and wanted games with BMX and Skateboards. Firebird suggested various changes to the game, and Jason didn’t want to make these changes. He felt the game would distance too much away from what he really wanted.

The game itself is quite good, and something which would have faired well on the budget range. It was a little hard to play, and probably needs a lot more, but Jason i’m sure would have had the ability to do so with the final version.

This is it of the game, and case closed. All you will see of a game which Firebird wanted to change too much for Jason’s liking.

Jason gives an account in his own words in Creator Speaks, extracted from his webpage, where he first released this game.

Grab it and check out a piece of Firebird history…

This interesting game is best described as a Uridium style shoot’em’up and was to be published by CRL in 1988 but the game company went bankrupt.

The preview features some nice music and graphics, and i’m sure it would have recieved fair reviews in the magazines had CRL lasted long enough to sell the game.

Well, Jukka has released it at long last to the public…. and its a great classic feeling game. I just hope that Jukka can find the full game from somewhere, if it was ever finished.

For now, read what Jukka had to say about the game he did the graphics for in ‘Creator Speaks’.

Unfortunately not snapped up by another game’s company.

An early game by David Spicer, who went on to work with Nick Taylor on a host of C64 games.

This was one of David’s first commercial projects for Martech, and it involved pizza deliveries and navigating around on escalators.Sadly, not much was ever done on the game as David was made redundant after about a week into the game.

The game essentially was about delivering pizza’s if you hadn’t already guessed, but was strangely based in a kind of shopping centre, with a mass of escalators and moving walkways hindering the player. Not much else is recalled about the game design…

Hopefully one of the main designers will come across this and be able to shed more light about this game. All else we know is that the game was originally known as an Atari ST demo which Dave Spicer was shown as he started out at the company. This was a small window with a series of escalators which were animating. Dave was told to simply copy it.

Now thanks to Dave Spicer, you can check out what was Pizza Delivery on the C64. Luckily Dave found most of his work disks where this demo survived from the downfall of Martech. This is a weeks worth of work before the company got into a bit of trouble
and Dave was made redundant. Although nothing is playable, it is great to see what the game looked like at the death, and to maybe try to imagine what the final game would have been like… though at a very early stage that might be quite hard.

Check out what Dave has to say about the game, but this is another GTW title which we can close the door on.. Or is it?… What exactly were the plans for this game, what would it really have been like?.. Next stop is to track down the designers of the game to find out their thoughts. Onwards then we go… :).

A small title which had a small living period…

A interesting puzzle game with some very interesting credits too.

Created by Miles Barry, who has had an unfortunate record with his game releases, having worked on Fuzzball and Escape From Colditz as well as this little puzzler.

Graphics were provided by none other than Andy Roberts, who you will all know from the days of Commodore Format, and today with Thalamus Interactive.

And the music?, well Apex are penned as doing the music and sfx, but according to Andy, they never got to do this, so the music was taken from a variety of demos. If anyone can name the ingame tune’s author, please let me know!

A strong set of credits, for a reasonable puzzle effort. The release situation was likely to be budget, though no publisher has had their name linked to this game. Miricle Designs was the only name found, which I assume was Miles Barry’s own team.

The game was scrapped, due to both Miles and Andy moving on and parting company. Andy went to work with Apex, and Miles went to work with the guys behind Escape From Colditz. The game was doomed from that point on.

The idea was to actually pitch the title to Codemasters as a cheap budget title, and they were the main targets for the title. Sadly it never happened.

What we have here is pretty much how far the game ever got. The good news is that it comes with a Level Editor, so it could be finished off. Andy tells GTW that he would wish to do better graphics, as he was quite new to this kind of thing when he first did Perplexity. So enjoy what could have been as we lay this game to rest.

A puzzling story with a clear ending… and case closed…

Indeed, there was another version of Penguin Tower in production, by non other than Ewen Gillies.

After the non-appearance of the original game by Jani Hirvo, Ewen was very disappointed and decided to create and finish off the original game for people to play, though project work stopped at one point. Ewen had started the whole game from scratch, using the graphics from the original.

While in conversation with Wayne Womersley of Art Ravers, Wayne found out that Ewen had this game that was in production, but he needed a musician. Wayne, a big fan of Andrew Fisher’s music, got them both in contact, and a co-op version of the game was to be produced.

Andrew created a series of jolly tunes for the game (Which are currently in HVSC), but sadly Ewen only really completed a few previews before stopping work to move away from the C64 scene for good.

Ewen also got Kevin Tilley involved, and asked Kevin to design all the levels and some additional bits for the game. Kevin did so, though Ewen never got to see the designs, and Ewen disappeared and scrapped the game due to PC commitments.

The game was very near complete, and what with Kevin’s level designs and Andrew’s music.. this could be a almost complete Penguin Towers game. It JUST needs to be bolted together really. The game played very fair to the original title by Jani Hirvo (It’s not known if Jani knew about this conversion).

The preview still exists, and now thanks to Ewen and Andrew, they can now be downloaded. Basically the zip file consists of the preview itself, all the SID music that Andrew composed, a Level editor for the preview and some level maps. Hopefully one day I will be able to present a more complete version with title screen and the music integrated.

This is an accurate version of Penguin Towers, and you may be surprised. What with the Level Editor being present, the potential of finally seeing Penguin Towers on the C64 in some form was a reality. Well, in 2023 – the original game was finally finished off and released by Jani, which you can find here.

A case closed once more for GTW, and a successful one at that.