Games That Weren't^®

I have to admit, I was surprised to see that a Miami Vice game actually went unreleased when Frank sent me the details of this one. Surely a game based on such a huge TV show could find its way onto the market? A little digging around brought forth possible reasons as to why it may not have come to fruition.

Firstly there had already been a Miami Vice game released three years earlier across the 8-bit platforms. Its not that perhaps the market was saturated already, but the fact the original game got such bad reviews, the C64 version getting a mere 30% in Zzap! Magazine. On the other hand, a successful use of the license would surely have overcome the hurdle of a stinker of a first game; a different company would have produced it after all.

Another puzzler is the fact it was planned on being released around Christmas 1989. Surely a game based on a hit TV show, released at Christmas, would be like a license to print money?

Looking at the databases on World of Spectrum, GB64 and CPC Zone, it seems that Softek weren’t exactly prolific games developers, and their only entries I could find on WoS are for games compilers and on CPC Zone. I only found one game entry. On GB64 there were relatively more, with eight entries going back to 1983, whether it was the same Softek trading in 1983 as 1989 I simply don’t know, but perhaps there was an inexperience or inability to get games onto the market, or maybe there wasn’t enough of a cash flow to see

Miami Vice to fruition after paying for the license. Certainly their last entry on GB64 is from 1988, the year before Miami Vice was due to be released suggesting they were struggling by the end of the eighties.

Nothing else was known about the game, the only reference we had is a passing mention in Zzap magazine, so we don’t even know the possible storyline or style of the game, but I’d guess that this is yet another game to fall by the wayside whilst a dying software house tried to save itself from going under.

Martin Smith dug out some info however: http://www.worldofspectrum.org /infoseekpub.cgi?regexp= ^Softek+Software+International +Ltd$ shows that Softek released quite a few Spectrum games and also owned the ACE and Edge labels. It’s very likely that they folded before getting the game released. http://hol.abime.net/search .php?N_ref_publisher=182 suggests that they did one game in 1991 but nothing else after 1989.

A Capstone advertisement was found in a US sales catalogue from 1989, so it does seem that a game was on the cards.  It is currently listed as abandonware on the PC Dos platform.

Martin/Stadium 64 then in October 2017 dug out some flyers from a sealed copy of Intracorp’s Pro Football Facts and Predications (released in 1989).  This shows that Miami Vice was supposed to be released in July 1989.

Martin suggests that the Capstone and Softek versions could be two separate editions, though my theory so far is that Softek were producing the game and Capstone to distribute in the US.   We need to get proper credits though to fully confirm.  Martin suggests that Capstone released the Tynesoft version of Superman, so it seems plausible.  Maybe even Tynesoft were involved?

More details needed, but progress being made!

Mewlio is a point and click adventure game which takes place on the island of Martinique. Developed by French Software house "Coktel Vision", who only seem to ever have released Lucky Luke on the C64 (The French were big into the Amstrad more than the C64). The game got released on the ST, Amiga, PC and CPC and was also penned for the C64.

German computer magazine, "Chip" (March 1988, P.18) announced the game was coming. According to the article, the game was honoured with the silver medal of the city of Paris by ex-president Jacques Chirac. This was all the information in the article.

Sadly the C64 conversion never surfaced, and it seems it was axed due to poor support for the C64 in France. We’re not 100% sure, and we will need to do a bit of digging to find out more. Lucky Luke had no credits attached, so we couldn’t get any initial leads. So there is some work to be done here to uncover more details.

The released Amiga/ST versions didn’t go down very well, and it was described as a primative adventure game. Still, we’d like to find out more.

Do you know anything about this game?

A very short entry for now for a game that was one of many that never quite made it from Crystal Software back in the later end of the 90’s.

This game was to be the sequel to the released McRat game, which gathered average reviews upon its release and got reviewed in Commodore Format.

We know little more about the game, but ex-CEO Alex de Vries of Crystal Software had the following to say which explains why all of these titles never made it:

“I used to be the CEO of Crystal Software back when it was developing and publishing games for the C64 and Amiga platforms before making the transition to PC only. The Legend of Kyril was actually an Austrian project we signed up as a last effort to see if we could sell decent volume on the C64 if the quality was there for the title. Our involvement was purely in sales and marketing and we were never involved in the creative side of things. I wish I could remember the names of the developers but it’s just too long ago.

Code exists for some but I have moved halfway across the world since those days so I don’t know whether anything survived. I don’t have a copy anymore in any case.

We packed it in after 1996 and cancelled all projects for the C64 in Q1 1997. Titles we did (re-)publish were McRat, The Zinj Complex, Target, It’s Magic, Colorzone, Riddles and Stones and a few others. Not the greatest stuff but it was fun while it lasted.”

Do you know any more about this game?…

Any C64 user will know who and what Mayhem is. Rated as one of the best games ever made (Although contested by some people), Mayhem was planning a comeback briefly in a new outing called "Mayhem Deluxe".

The Apex boys talked about plans to bring up an updated version of Mayhem, complete with new levels, new enemies, remixed levels, new tunes, minor improvements and maybe even a level editor. This was all depending on how good the sales of the first game were.

Although sales of the game were very good, it seems Mayhem Deluxe was merely an idea which lost its way. It was a good idea, but after all the sales of Mayhem, it looked like the C64 was dying out and the Apex boys had to move on… and so they did. Mayhem did surface on the Mobile phones recently in ‘Mayhem’s Magic Dust’, but the C64 sequel was sadly never to be… and never will be for that matter…. ah well…

It is not known yet if anything was ever started on a sequel, though its highly unlikely that it ever was. We will be asking questions soon, so hopefully we can either close the case or have a case to chase… we shall see.

Case closed for now…

This is a surprising title which hasn’t really been discussed as a missing Matthew Smith game, and really it isn’t much to do with Matthew apart from improving one of his games on the Commodore 64 and was most likely a bit of a dig at Matthew Smith when he went to Software Projects and took Manic Miner with him.

The idea apparently was for this title was to improve upon the C64 version of Manic Miner. This may have included the use of multi-colour graphics and other graphical and sonic improvements.

According to a news article about the title, the game was at an “advanced state of development” at the time of them writing. There were stated to also be “many improvements” to the original game to take advantage of the C64 infrastructure over the ZX Spectrum.

Additionally (thanks to Andrew Nicklin!) in PC Games 1984, the following news snippet was given:

“Bug-byte hope to have a replacement for Manic Miner in the shops by early spring. The program, to be called Matty Goes Mining, will be a multi-level game for the Commodore 64.

Nasty things will happen to Cabbage Patch Dolls and many well-known figures in the computer industry will be lampooned. The program is written by Wayne Quinn, who is not a Hollywood cowboy star but a 16-year-old Liverpudlian.”

So at last we get a credit confirmation, and its the developer!…. Now how far did it get?

This was all that was ever heard of the game, and it never surfaced anywhere. Certainly if it was at an advanced state, then we’d like to see and find out what happened to it. Matthew was quizzed on this title and didn’t know anything about it unsurprisingly, but we now have a coder link.

In November 2021, a friend of Wayne – Chris Griffin, shed more light on this game and what actually happened. The title was originally started as a conversion of Manic Miner for the C64. When Matthew Smith got out of contract with Bug Byte, Wayne recoded the game to ‘Matty Goes Mining’, but it was never finished before Bug Byte collapsed.

The news article was incorrect, and Wayne was not a Liverpudlian. He was born in Wiltshire and moved up to Ellesmere Port when he was about 3 years old. Wayne and Chris were best friends, and Chris would help Wayne with conversion of the graphics. They were never sent the originals, so he and Wayne had to painstakingly redraw everything using 8×8 graph paper. Wayne used Zeus assembler to program the game, and the C64 and disk drive was given to him to use from Bug Byte.

Sadly Wayne passed away 3 years ago, so we will never get to hear his thoughts about the development or potentially see anything of his conversion and extended game. We thank Chris though for sharing with us the story about the game’s development and his memories.