Games That Weren't^®

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.

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!