Games That Weren't^®

Another game from Twilight duo, Harold Klink and Martijn Althuizen.

This time we have a set of very promising space SEU demos which were a new development by Twilight which sadly were cancelled early on. These were given a game title of "Firethorn", which was actually thought up and coined by Jeroen Tel at the time.

There are 3 demos in total, showing various techniques which were picked up at the time. Harold had recently picked up the technique of producing parallax scrolling on the C64 and these were the results.

The games didn’t get very far, and this was pretty much it. However, Jeroen Tel apparently gave the guys some unreleased music to use in the game, which doesn’t seem to be in any of the demos unfortunately. There might be another version out there somewhere which has this music in. We’ll certainly be taking another look through the disks to see if we can find a version with the music.

Check out the demos and also some extra bonus goodies from the guys which were also found on their work disks. Various intros unused and music demos.

Overall the demos show some promising ideas, but sadly they never got far enough to make anything really playable. They are certainly worth a look though!

More soon from the developers on these demos…

A strange game which was popular on the Amiga, mainly for its wacky animation.

This game featured a blue blob of putty which could mould itself into numerous shapes and absorb strange creatures to help defeat a geezer called Dazzledaze. Decent animation, weird cartoony graphics etc planned to form superb platform puzzler on the 64.

Apparently the game became too complex for the 64 and was binned so that concentration was focused on Fuzzball. All that remains was to be a tech demo featuring the blob and most of its animations.

Robin Levy was confirmed to have been working on the C64 version of the game, doing all the graphics. As for the coder, it was none other than John Kemp behind the programming.

The animation was very sophisticated and ate away at memory, using up many sprites to simply stretch. The idea of having Sprite overlays was virtually impossible, and various problems occurred in the development. All of this added up to morale being lost on the project, and eventuated in John Kemp leaving the games industry for good.

Jason Kelk confirmed seeing the preview while up at System 3, and apparently was at very early stages, probably what Commodore Format saw when they took their preview picture. The sprite animated very well in the demo.

Originally around 2006, things were looking very bleak. The likelihood of the game surviving was very slim. John Kemp had checked and could not find Putty on any of his work disks. The only place it may have existed was on the 286 PDS which System 3 had. It was likely that this was now long gone, and thus Putty C64 was looking to be immortalized only as the one single solitary scanned screen from Commodore Format.

But in early 2008 things took a rather surprising turn! John Kemp managed to find a few disks labelled with “Putty” and confirmed that he had found the last version of the game. All disks were passed to Dan Phillips to preserve, but then Dan got a job in Canada and then passed the disks to Robin Levy. With everyone being very busy the past few years, it is only recently in December 2010 that Robin posted GTW a bundle of disks which included the remains of Putty.

And so we are very pleased to announce the salvaging and preservation of yet another long lost title which you can now download and check out! (Thanks to Slator for the bug fixed version!)

Now don’t expect something fully playable, as you will not find that. But what you will find is a promising tech demo with some unseen graphics done by the great Robin Levy where you can control Putty and navigate around various little platforms. Controls are a bit fiddly, especially jumping – which is achieved by holding down for a long period of time then releasing in a direction to make Putty jump far. The stretch animations are superb, and it looked like things were really coming together!

Additionally – a bonus was to discover additional screens as you climb vertically, giving a glimpse of screens never seen before. Overall the preview makes you wonder that had they not done the hi-res overlays, how a Putty conversion could well have been very possible. This early preview proves that something was possible :)

Finally that’s not quite all – but there were also a bundle of PC based disks with Putty labelled which we could not read. We believe this is the source code to the preview. We don’t believe there will be anything else that isn’t in the preview, but we will try and confirm anyway and see if we can preserve the sources. Before we also forget, here are scans of the disk labels of the work disks.

So now all that is left is to possibly hear more from John Kemp himself about the game and his development thoughts, but we are now very close to closing a case which has been open for over 10 years now for GTW. Enjoy!

Case pretty much now closed and with a good ending! :-)

After the games stopped being reviewed in Commodore Format, it looked like the end. That was, until a games explosion occurred and where this little gem was all seemingly ready for release.

Being coded in Finland, this Bomberman clone was something that the dwindling C64 scene was crying out for and Commodore Format magazine jumped on it like a pack of hungry wolves when they heard about it. At the time Jon Wells was also trying to keep the C64 going, and made an arrangement with the coder to distribute the game in the UK and sell across Europe too.

After packaging up a 10 level preview for Commodore Format’s Power Pack and requesting for interest in the game. Jon received a staggering amount with 700 reservation slips received – which was a lot at the time when readers were abandoning the platform rapidly for the likes of the Sony PlayStation.

When Jon attempted to finalize details with the coder, he never had any reply from multiple contact attempts. A massive shame, as it could have made a reasonable amount of money for both.

Jani Hirvo, the coder of the game, got in touch with GTW – saying the game was 90% complete with 100 levels all in place and that he could one day finish it. This was however around 2000 time, so of course it seemed very unlikely after over 20 years (and 27 since the preview itself!). Jani informed us that the game had a new intro, outro, music and high score compared with the demo version we all have.

Interestingly on a separate note – a separate re-development of the game was carried out and started, which is slightly controversial, as it was never authorised by Jani. The development is essentially the same, with the same graphics and new contributed levels. It was born out of frustration of the original game never seeing release. It’s an interesting curiosity to check out: https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/penguin-tower-v2/

Jani was surprised to learn about the 700 reservations with Jon Wells, and didn’t know about Jon’s contact attempts. Had he known, he would have certainly finished the game to fulfil the pre-orders. Over the years we had tried to encourage Jani to finish the game.

We had hoped that our page on the game and video post updates would potentially spur on Jani – especially with the resurgence of the C64 in recent years too (mentioning the likes of Psytronik and Protovision as potential outlets). Jani did give hope that he would some day finish the game – but he had no idea when :)

Well – finally in November 2023, Jani finally made time and decided to finish off the game once and for all and release to the world in its final state, completely for free. It marks almost 30 years since the game first entered our minds, and it is amazing to finally see the game and enjoy it as originally intended.

In December 2023, Jani then added all of the source code onto GitHub, which you can find here: https://github.com/mokdevel/PenguinTower_c64

A huge thank you to Jani for finishing his work – and yet another case closed in the GTW archives!

A rather yellow looking, but impressive representation of the Another World animated introduction on the C64.

Called ‘Outside’, its not known if this intro was created as part of another game, or actually just as a demo part.

More confirmation needed, but this is impressive to watch and an example of the C64 working really hard.

Music is wonderfully composed by Eye/Vermes… who does great C64 music.

Another World on your C64, in some format…

An exclusive look at another Cosmos Designs title you may not have heard about before. This is another fantastic looking Cosmos Designs game which has sadly never seen the light of day.

We didn’t know much about the game, but it seemed very similar to Zamzara/Hawkeye, and featured a very similar kind of graphical scenario and status bar. The game was almost completed, but sadly never released due to troubles with publishers in 1993.

Some guys on the C64 scene managed to find the old disks and get as much together as possible for Bernd. This mean’t possibly Bernd could finish off the game quickly and release it.

After many years of sitting within the GTW archives – the game has finally been finished off and has been released by Psytronik and Protovision:
https://www.protovision.games/games/outrage.php?language=en

Thanks to the organisation of our very own David Simmons over a number of years, you can now purchase as a digital download or a boxed physical release. Here is what Protovision has to say about the game:

“In the tradition of “Hawkeye”, you are steering a figure through a number of platform levels. In a shop you can obtain different weapons. Outrage inspires through colorful graphics and great design.

Outrage was produced by Cosmos Designs for the Boeder Talent Competition in cooperation with the 64’er magazine a long time ago. However, it was not released back then. We in Protovision bought the rights to distribute the game from Bernd Buchegger, who supplied us with the remnants of the game – of course without source codes and with a few bugs and glitches we’d liked to get fixed before a release. However, we were lacking the resources to work on this game, so we were looking for help. Psytronik came along and showed interest in finalizing and distributing the game, but they, too, were facing the same problems as we did. Thanks to everyone involved in this project, we can finally announce that Outrage has been completed!”

A fantastic outcome for once for a game in the archives, and one where we are pleased to say … “Case closed!” :-)

Unfortunately another game in the archive I couldn’t get working to tell you about.

Its quite a simple puzzler, with high detailed monocrome hi-res backgrounds.

I remember the preview being very poor, and not really getting me too excited.

More information on this game when it comes up hopefully soon. No credits are known as of yet.

Nice backdrops… thats it…