Games That Weren't^®

Another of Andrew Rodger’s planned games during the C64’s demise. This was to be released on his own Robotronics label.

Sadly the game was never to be, and apart from a single mention in Commodore Format, there was nothing to ever be seen of the game.

The game was simply described in issue 47 of Commodore Format as “amazing cartoon violence”. For years we tried to get hold of Andrew, but however thanks to Andrew Fisher, we got in touch with Andrew in 2013 and find that sadly the game never really got off the ground.

The game was to be based on the arcade game where you squash moles that pop up with a mallet. Andrew never played the game, but saw a photo in an issue of C&VG and was inspired by it. In Mole Squash, you play a dumb-looking dog that jumps up and down platforms in the style of Capcom’s SonSon game.

Andrew loved the jumping/shooting gameplay, but this game had the dog holding a mallet instead of firing guns. The Bally Midway game Timber was also apparently an influence on the graphics – with a fixed screen approach to each level, with various platform layouts across each. The dog would run around and try and bash the moles before they disappeared. Moles were in several colours – denoting different speed/points.

The game sadly didn’t get too far, but Andrew believes that he still has various sketches for the game and its design around somewhere. Also he may have coded it as far as the dog jumping around platforms. Not much to see, but certainly could be something to preserve! Andrew is hoping to check his disks very soon and see if there is anything to be saved.

Check out the creator speaks section for now, but could potentially be a case closed very soon it seems!

Another V1 title, with an interesting story behind it too! It was always wondered by Andrew Fisher if originally Antony Crowther’s “Challenge of the Gobots” game was something else before. Well we now have confirmation thanks to Andrew that the game was to be called “Moebius” / “Moebius Strip” and released by Alligata software. However, Antony moved to Ariolasoft and took the game with him.

At first the game had nothing to do with Gobots, but it was quickly changed and had Ross Goodley provide an animated storybook bolted on to make it an official Gobots game. According to the Computer Gamer write up, the game as a result was a heck of a lot better than the original Alligata title.

However, the Moebius tag is still used in the final released game with the full title being “Challenge of the Gobots – On the Moebius Strip”. It might have been that Tony had planned for it to be based on Gobots, but Alligata didn’t have the licence and hence he called it Moebius (Some say it was actually called “Moebius Strip”).

We are now trying to find out if anything exists of the original game in its original form. How different would it have been? Would it have been the same game with Gobot sprites, or something vastly different?

This game was being created by Richard Kay (who later started Software Creations) and Hugh Riley. The game also was to feature music by Peter Clarke.

It was a non scrolling platform game on a spaceship with evil monsters that your spaceman had to defeat.

There was apprently an arcade game in the coding recreation area called Mission of Mercy on which both guys play the whole game within the game to find out what was coming next.

The game hasn’t been seen, though the music did sneak out thanks to Peter Clarke. And because the game was scrapped, he reused the music in Ocean’s poor game ‘Double Take’.

Thanks to a brilliant interview with C64.com, Peter had the following to say when asked if he had worked on any games that never got released:

"Yeah! Mission of Mercy by Software Creations. Although, I’ve only found out recently that it never was released. Paulie got himself hired by Ocean in Manchester and he offered them the music for Double Take.

At the same time, I was talking to Software Creations, down the road from Ocean, literally five minutes walk from St Peter’s Square along Oxford Road in Manchester. I had offered the same music to Software Creations for Mission of Mercy. Both accepted before anyone realised!

I walked into Woolworths and there’s Double Take on a TV-screen with the scrolling credits saying ‘Music by Paul Hughes’. I was really angry thinking my friend had deceived me. Anyway, I went to Ocean to clear things up. Paulie got in a bit of trouble for it and Ocean were upset and talked about the lack of exclusivity. I told them that they didn’t have my permission to publish my music! They backed down and offered me a job, so I took it."

Not much else is known about the game, or its completeness…. Was this ever finished as well as released?

Strange game with a lack of information…

Back in the 1980’s, Atarisoft were doing official conversions for the Commodore 64. Missile Command was one of them!

We learn of this conversion thanks to Mat Allen who has documented the conversion briefly in Digital Press. We hope to learn more about the conversion soon as a result.

We are not sure at present how far the game got, or why it was cancelled, but we guessed it was due to Atarisoft breaking up at some point. However, Phobos/Ready64 found a snippet in Video Game Update (August 1984 – see scans) which suggests that Jack Tramiel got Atarisoft to stop all C64 developments and focus just on Atari. It wasn’t the video game crash that caused the cancellation of titles. Thanks to Roberto Nicoletti and Phobos for the heads up.

Thanks to Duc Nguyen, it has been found on the GDRI webpage that Bob MacDowell was the coder behind the conversion. Early days, but its a lead!

Do you know more?

It was thought for many years that “Miner Willy Meets The Taxman” and “Megatree” were the same game, and that the first title was the working title for “Megatree”. Well, after attending a Q/A session with Matthew Smith at a CGEUK 2004 at Croydon, Matthew startled listeners when he talked about “MWMTT” and revealed that it was actually a separate game in itself.

In this title, Miner Willy has to travel back and forward in time and try and avoid the Taxman at different periods of history, collecting coins to pay the Taxman at the end of the game. Not much else is currently known at present, but we hope to speak to Matthew Smith at a future retro event to find out more.

Certainly, the Taxman part was thought to be a feature of Megatree, but it seems that over the years, the press mixed up the nature of the two titles and they combined into one GTW.

No doubt, although this would have been a Spectrum game first off, it would have had a C64 incarnation coded by another programmer. Matthew had no part on other machines at that time apart from the Speccy.

As far as GTW can tell and from what Matthew has said so far, it seems only bits and pieces of the Spectrum game were ever started. It is hoped that some of Matthew’s work disks and tapes will be recovered and something can some day be shown – but it will only be of a Spectrum conversion.

In 2021, Martyn Carroll revealed for Crash Magazine that Derrick Rowson was tasked by Alan Maton to create Taxman after JSW 2. Derrick produced a preliminary demo of a single scene stretched over four rooms and laid out in the style of Jet Set Willy, but played more like Manic Miner.

As you explored each of the 4 rooms, the action would carry on as you moved onto another room. So for instance, if a baddy followed you, then they would appear in the next room with you. Rather than flick screen, the game had a sort of scroll effect to move between rooms when Willy got to a certain point (a half screen jump).

Interestingly, as he worked on the demo – 6502 programmer Tom Lanigan sat with Derrick and got effectively a lesson in Z80 and helped Derrick on the game. When Tom left, he took a demo with him to show off at Odin to get a job. Odin asked Software Projects why the game was being demoed, and the shock of it being out there would cause Software Projects to decide to cancel the game.

Sadly Derrick no longer has the demo, but there is a faint possibility that Tom still does. Hopefully it will some day surface, but we don’t expect there to have ever been a C64 version started, but we are prepared to be surprised.

Yet another Edge title. The game was advertised in magazines such as CVG in 1986, and was brought to GTW’s attention thanks to Lee Theasby who kindly provided the advert scan. The game was an adventure RPG which was in the same style as the Gargoyle games from the looks of things.

The game saw a release primarily on the Spectrum platform (See WOS at http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0003975), but typically the C64 version never surfaced as promised.

A recent contributor had found that in Soft, #5, September/October 1987, pg. 8, there was news that this Spectrum-game from 1986 was said to be converted to the Commodore in 1987. Well that was the plan at least.

Pennsoft (British converting team – mispelt as Pennysoft) said that the game should have been ready in August/September 1987 but the team had some problems, which delayed the release. Furthermore, if those problems weren’t solved, the public had to wait until November or the beginning of December 1987 to see the Commodore-version. Sadly, nothing more was ever heard.

It is very likely that Pennsoft could have been converting straight from z80 code, and hence had speed issues which were hard to solve. We need to find these Pennsoft guys and find out more about what happened… but its a big lead and hopefully it will lead us to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow (If it is gold that is…).

Thanks to Professor Chaos – he made the correction that Pennysoft was infact Pennsoft, and this has led to some possible leads to try and learn more about the C64 development, especially via Andrew Wright. So watch this space!