Keeping with all the hype of the ex-world champion, Gremlin bought the rights to produce a game based on the famous British Formula One driver, with Nigel Mansell’s World Championship.
Originally, it seemed that by 1992 – Gremlin felt it was time to move on from the 8-bit platforms, and their new licence was just to be a 16-bit release. However, magazines of the time would help to make Gremlin reconsider, with Commodore Format pushing their readers to fill in a small slip to ask for the game to be converted.
Just a few issues later, it was announced that Gremlin had an overwhelming response and had now decided to have 8-bit conversions as a last hurrah of sorts. Even the FreeWheel Logic 3 had adverts for the game on the Commodore 64, with the steering wheel supported on the platform (see scans).
However, although ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC editions (developed by Mike Chilton) would see release and scoring very well (apart from some crippling multiloads), the Commodore 64 version was never even previewed and disappeared without a trace.
As a result, the game became one of the holy grail titles for the C64, one which many had been looking forward to including myself. After years of nothing, things began to ramp up in 2012.
Darren Melbourne got in touch with GTW and shed some important light on the game. It was was indeed in development, worked on by Enigma Variations – where it was project managed by Darren, with code by Andrew Bowen and graphics by Paul McKee.
Darren told GTW that the game was shaping up very well, and featured some of the most impressive road routines he’d ever seen on a C64. He reported that there were smooth corners and undulating hills were working extremely well on the C64, and pushed things to the limit.
Unfortunately, too much development time was spent on trying to perfect the road routine, and when it came to releasing the CPC + Spectrum versions, the C64 version was still an estimated 6 weeks away from completion.
Gremlin felt that it was 6 weeks too long, and by that point – they would have missed the chance to make any profit from the title. Many C64 users could well have moved onto consoles by that point. As a result, they decided to cancel the game – even though instructions still referenced the C64 edition for both tape and disk mediums.
The recovery process
Sadly, Darren didn’t have anything of the game himself within his disk collection that we preserved, and neither did the team that worked on it. There was still hope that something may exist within the Enigma Variations archives.
In early 2025, GTW were finally asked to help preserve works from their archives, thanks to Mark Greenshields (and for Darren arranging). The expectation was to find a series of NES titles that never saw the light of day, but we were stunned to find the entire PDS source code back up to Nigel Mansell on the C64.
This was dated 29th March 1993, and seemingly when Enigma Variations were asked to stop work on the conversion. Present was also a music binary file, suggesting that the game could have been possibly closer to completion than we thought.
Thanks to the amazing work of CSixx, Martin Pugh, Bieno, Arcane, Dave Simmons and Ax!s (who has created a conversion of the CPC loading screen), we can now see just how far the C64 version had come – and its much much further than we ever thought, even though still a bit away from completion to mark up as a full game.
Pretty much all of the tracks are present within the game, and it seems straight away that the NES release of the game was a major inspiration – with the look/feel replicated of the console edition, rather than looking anything like the other 8-bit editions.
You can race against other cars and also put in qualifying laps – there is also a tutorial feature where you can drive with Nigel Mansell and get tips on how to become a better driver. It’s glitchy at this stage in places (especially with the road routine), and there only seems to be one car on the screen at a time – we guess this would have been improved over the last few weeks, as graphical mock-ups we also recovered show more than one car present.
Pitstops are missing, and also road-side objects at this stage. As well as there only being one car, there are no variations in colours and the main car’s wheels are lacking animations to make them look like they are spinning. All areas which no doubt would have been improved and polished before the final release.
Sadly, although there was also music and sfx in binary form in the archive – none of it ever got to be integrated. A music demo is included which showcases the title music, and several sub tunes by Gerard Gourley (who certainly got around at the tail end of the C64’s life!). There might be some SFX tucked away in there too according to comments in the binary.
Amazingly, the entire game has been crammed into a single load, and overall, it has all the makings of what could have been a brilliant racing game had it been finished. The potential is all there, and you can see just how agonizingly close it was.
There are even some bits of content tucked away that were never used – so more secrets to discover too. Martin Piper for instance found a hidden talking head for Nigel Mansell – likely to have been used for the training segment. Warren Pilkington ripped the tunes as a SID (see downloads) and found 5 unused bits of SFX as well.
So at long last – check out something of a Nigel Mansell game on your C64 for yourself as we close the case on a title that has haunted Games That Weren’t for 26 years and C64 users for much longer. Enjoy! Perhaps next we can find the missing Martech one? ;)
It is with a huge thank you to both Mark Greenshields and Darren Melbourne for making this recovery possible!
Video coverage
