Preserving Cancelled & Unreleased Video Game History Since 1999
Welcome to Games That Weren't!
We are an Cancelled & Unreleased Video games archive with prototypes, developer history and assets for many computers and consoles of all ages. A non-profit large archive dedicated to preserving lost games that were never released to the public. Sharing history and stories from the developers, assets and more before it is too late. GTW has been preserving lost video game history online since 1999, and long before that offline.
Please Browse our archive and discover the many entries that we host for many different platforms.
Mind Runner was a game by a friend of Kevin Murphy, who has many GTW’s listed in the archive such as Thunderzone. This was a game by his friend, Jason Steele (Not the same guy who did Hunchback for Ocean) back in 1988 time.
Mind Runner was a promising looking game which was similiar to Martin Walker’s Citadel game but was actually strangely being developed simultaneously and was not a rip off of Martin’s game. Unfortunately it was the fact that Citadel came out 3 months before Jason could finish his game which killed development. Jason felt that no-one would touch the game as it was too close to Citadel.
All that remains now is a very rough demo level with no playability, just to iron out bugs. There are some sprite routines and around 30 level designs complete though, so it sounds like a fair chunk of the game was created.
We have asked Jason about the possibility of putting some remains on the website, but Jason is reluctant as there are some faults with parts of the preview and Jason would rather that things were a bit more polished. However, Jason has allowed us to put up a working version of the title screen,and screenshots of the game itself will hopefully follow soon!
It sounds like this was potentially a game which could have bettered Citadel, but we may never know. Jason offers a full insight into the game’s development within the Creator Speaks page. Now we just have to ponder what might have been…
Hopeful to see something of this game someday soon…
The premier issue of the German C64 magazine GO64!, issue 03/97, featured an article about the at that time quite unknown game producing crew, PROTOVISION. Their first game, Stroke World, was announced there, as well as the famous SuperCPU shoot’em up Metal Dust, which finally was released in 2005. There is also a mention of a project named “Hurrican” which eventually later turned into the “Turrican 3 V1” project also described here on GTW. But there was one other game mentioned of which we never heard of again: “Mike the Magic Dragon”.
Started in 1996, Mike the Magic Dragon was a conversion of the game with the same name from the Amiga. In fact, Mike the Magic Dragon was a very early Amiga release (1987, Kingsoft). It featured music from Crocket’s Theme and graphics in a style never seen before. Set in a fantasy realm, the little dragon Mike had to escape from various castles by solving a riddle and collecting diamonds.
The task was to collect letters in the right order to form a word, and the word always was a term from the computer world. The diamonds had to be collected completely, then a key would appear. Collecting the key, the game would check if the letters had been collected in the right order. If not, you had to re-collect them (but not the diamonds), else you reached the next level. On some platforms some enemies made your life harder. After time was up, you didn’t lose a life, however a spider came from above hunting you down.
Each level consisted of a great pixel artwork by Gabi Kittner, featuring a famous castle, and in fact this graphics plus the unusual use of the Miami Vice tune gave the game its extraordinary atmosphere.
The C64 conversion by Protovision was to be based on the same graphics converted from Amiga, using the Godot image processing tool. The special thing was that the graphics on the C64 were not in multi-colour (160×200, 3 colours in an 8×8 square + background colour), but instead in hires (320×200, only 2 colours and no extra background colour per 8×8 square). In fact the unique graphic style coincidentally allowed a very good conversion to the C64. Of course still a lot of re-touching was required and actually done for almost all levels (17 of 21).
The Amiga game had the same castle for three levels in different “atmospheres”: For example at night, at daylight, or in summer and in autumn etc. On the Amiga this was done by tricky palette changes, using the same picture. Due to the limit of C64 colors (16 vs. 4096) this didn’t look as good on C64, but it was considered to have at least two of the three castle pics each, so reducing the amount of levels to 2/3 of the original, which would not have been a problem.
Development was severely slowed down because the game’s author, Malte Mundt alias Thunderblade of Protovision, was heavily involved in releasing the monthly printed GO64! magazine from 1997 on. In 1998, he even released a monthly full-colour Amiga magazine, the “Amiga Fever”, in Germany (20.000 copies were printed each month!), which of course meant even less time for game coding. Another reason why the game was not continued probably was that it was based on converted graphics without actually having the legal rights to use them.
A very playable preview of the first level exists, but was never released. It features Mike, the elevators, the diamonds and letters but not the enemies. Also the parachute sprite is missing. Apart from that, the first level completely works. Today, Games That Weren’t can present it to the public as Thunderblade provided it to us.
And not only that! We got four D64 images with all level graphics in hires (Doodle) format, some IFF pictures from Amiga, the converted but not yet retouched title picture in Hires-FLI and all Source Code to the game. Thunderblade states that whoever wants can take it and finish the game. He warns though that the code may be quite crappy in places. ;-)
Really the C64 scene has been quiet spoilt in recent years, with hard, dedicated and enthusiastic sceners who have produced software of high commercial quality to keep us playing new things on our C64. Lasse Öörni is one of those sceners who has given the machine probably one of its most successful series since Dizzy.
Although the Metal Warrior had a much more serious and much darker theme to it than Dizzy ever had, and gameplay which was described by people as a 2D Half-life style of game.
So after a very successful trio of games, was their room for a 4th?…. Almost there wasn’t, but a change of heart meant that there eventually was in 2003.
So why is Metal Warrior 4 a GTW?… Well, it isn’t, but then Metal Warrior 4 had a very different shape and construction to it compared to the final release of the game.
A year’s worth of work had been done to the game by Lasse, there was an ambitious C-like scripting language which Lasse describes as “CovertScript”, which allowed multithreading capabilities for the game.
Gameplay is very similar to the final game, though climbing happens sideways, status displays are different, sprites are much shorter and screen frequency is 25hz instead of 50hz. The preview is very limited and scripted.. and has Lasse describes “The story idea I had at the time was much more cinematic and linear, opposed to the exploration and freeform combat in the final game.”
Also the game’s engine had key failures which meant that it was eventually scrapped, such as “there was no “global” world state” (as Lasse describes) and the level maps were reset each time a player entered it. Overall the engine was too over ambitious to fully work for a C64 game and so a major engine overhaul occurred in April/June 2003.
Graphically the first version of the game here is much more colourful, which each char having its own colour. The Intro picture is also slightly different, with brunet instead of blond. The Title screen is also different structurally.
Sonically the game is the same, with some minor SFX differences.
The actual game starts in a different location, which is inside the Agent HQ centre… so really the structure and appearance of the game is quite different to the final version (Although the majority of this preview would have been used in the final version).
This preview is playable, but it is an insight to how the game might have been had it followed its original style. Really though, the changes made were for the best, and allowed you to have a game which was far greater than what is here, but its still very interesting to look at and admire.
Lasse has kindly submitted his design notes also for you to check out and learn more about the game’s initial development before it had a major overhaul.
Yet more has been submitted by Lasse on the 13/05/05, which is a early test demo disk image featuring combat and talking in a test level. The disk image is labelled mw4_v1_combat.d64 and contains some content never seen before as far as we know. The preview is from early 2003.
If we learn more, or find anything else which can be added to this entry, then it will be done. But really this is a open and closed case, with no search needed to be made. If you want to play the full version of this, then go download the full complete version 2 which WAS finished.
An interesting early insight to a fantastic ending of a series…
Incredibly rich from his exploits in Manic Miner and partying away in Jet Set Willy, the third instalment was apparently to see our intrepid hero up against the bane of the nouvelle riche, the tax office!… The actual name for the game was to be Megatree, and it seems there has been a mix up over the years regarding this game and Miner Willy Meets the Taxman – both very different games.
With Megatree, Matthew was a big fan of the early Nintendo coin-ops (Donkey Kong, Mario Bros.) and the design was rumoured to be heavily influenced by them. Originally it was rumoured that even the main sprite was changed to look more like Mario in appearance.
The big shock (breaking tradition with the other Miner Willy games) was that the game would be coded first on the C64 and then ported to the Spectrum later, so to try and attract the American market as well.
The game centred around the ‘Megatree’ as featured in the first JSW. Each level was entered from a ‘branch’ of the tree. After a level was completed you could climb up a bit further to get to the next level and so on. A similar system to that used on the later Super Mario Bros. games on the NES and SNES.
Besides the single screen Manic Miner style levels, there were also horizontally scrolling landscape levels. You were to also be able to move in and out of the screen, as well as left and right. You had to collect a certain amount of coins from each level, presumably to pay the taxman at the end. But after recent conversation with Matthew Smith, it seems the “coin collecting” and “taxman” references were mixed up with his other title “Miner Willy and The Taxman”… a completely separate game.
Matthew was rumoured to be heavily into partying at the time and progress was very slow. Originally the team working on the game were shoved into a house together for 3 months. Software Projects brought in a couple more people to try and push the project along, but the ‘team’ wasn’t working out and the project was cancelled after 3 months with nothing much being completed.
It was originally believed that 30-40% of the game was completed before being scrapped, but this has found not to be the case, sadly. After initial contact from Stuart around 2003, he stunned the Retro Community by selling all his development disks on Ebay. The winning bidder?… None other than Retro Gamer magazine.
Issue 5 became a famous issue where the mystery of Megatree was finally laid to rest. Alas, findings proved not as fruitful as hoped for, but there was enough scraps to show to the world for the first time, including some rare sprites drawn by Matthew Smith (including a new Miner Willy character) and a backdrop by Stuart Fotheringham.
Stuart also provided sketches of how the game was to be, and so we could build a picture in our minds of what these guys were planning.
Retro Gamer officially released all the disk images on their Issue 7 cover mount. Thanks to them, GTW64 now hosts the original screenshots and bits which were salvaged from the disks – so you are able to see what remains. This includes a specially made picture show to run on your C64 of the game’s background, a slideshow that Retro Gamer presented at the CGEUK, all the disk materials and any extras.
GTW also made a small discovery and found on the disks a CHARSET which was being designed for Megatree… this was almost left unnoticed as the charset was mixed up on a Sprite disk. But Stuart Fotheringham confirmed that this was in fact a unfinished charset for Megatree when questioned.
Marc (Wilding) Dawson no longer has any code created for the game. A playable demo did surface while in development, but these are apparently long gone now. Stuart’s disks are now the only known bits of Megatree left.
Matthew is now long back from Holland and he made a very famous public visit to the CGCUK in July 2004. It is tricky to get hold of Matthew for long periods of time to talk about some of his projects, but it is hoped at the next opportunity we will get a bit more information about the game.
Mega Games was infamously a batch of very exciting games that were once in production for the c64 and Spectrum, and were said by the press (and of course Imagine themselves) to be very ahead of their time, with some incredible features. Imagine Software pushed the boat out with this one, but unfortunately it hit an iceberg pretty rapidly and sank without trace (or became one with Ocean, same thing I guess! ;) )
None of the 6 planned games were released. Two of the main games proposed and advertised a lot in the press at the time (see gallery below) were:
Bandersnatch (World of Spectrum page) – John Gibson & Ian Wetherburn – Spectrum with extra hardware
Psyclapse (See separate GTW64 entry) – Eugene Evans & Jake Glover – C64 with extra hardware. Graphics by Dawn Jones and possibly Ally Noble too.
Although neither got finished and only probably to around 30-50% completion status, they left their mark. Additionally there were two other titles in development, which very little focus was put upon:
Hero – programmed by John Heap (Spectrum) and Dave Colclough (C64) – A game we know very little about (See GTW64 entry)
Star Traders – programmed by Marc Dawson (C64) and Daryl Dennis (Spectrum) (See GTW64 entry)
Both games were started at the same time. Neither of these games had correct titles only working titles. The 5th and 6th games in the series are currently unknown, and hopefully some names will be produced soon to complete the story.
So what was so special about these games, and why did it eventually result in the ultimate demise of Imagine Sofware?
At the time, Imagine was enjoying huge sales and success, and expanding at a rate of knots. Unfortunately Imagine felt at the time that they were being damaged badly by piracy, and as a preventative measure, came up with the idea of the Mega Games series, which would require an additional piece of hardware attached to the machine to play the game.
The additional piece of hardware was essentially a glorified RAM expansion pack, very similiar to what MikroGen released later (and which ironically contributed to their downfall). Although the idea was pretty good with the ability to provide vastly improved graphics and sizable games, the price of RAM was very expensive – and would have made a purchase around £40-60. Of course, this was far too much for those used to spending around £6-10 for a C64/Spectrum game back then.
It has been suggested that the idea was the brain child of Mark Butler, and Bruce Everiss had tried to stop the idea – suggesting it was crazy and would never work. But it was decided to press on, and the entire meltdown of the company was covered by BBC documentary Commercial Breaks.
After not being able to pay various companies whom it owed money, Imagine went under and the name (and some of its assets) were brought by Ocean Software, who continued to use the name right up until around 1990.
The Mega Games themselves were never properly finished, though many ideas were taken onto other future games done by Denton Designs and Psygnosis (a company who’s name was based from Psyclapse – Psygnosis originally being called Psyclapse). Looking at Gift of the Gods, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Bratacus will show pretty much many ideas mean’t for both Bandersnatch and Psyclapse.
Bratacus in particular was essentially Bandersnatch patched up and finished off on the Amiga/ST as Psygnosis’ first ever release (and is is apparently actually a mix of the two original Mega Games).
In recent times, the Mega Games has provided a fascinating story of the rapid rise and fall of a games company in the early 80’s. Not only that, there is increased interest in the games that never quite made it and a lot of hope in recovering them in their final state. Although Bandersnatch seems all but lost, with John Gibson no longer having any materials – Ally Nobel offers hope that she still has all the logos and sprites on sketch paper in her attic … and of course Psyclapse and Star Raiders are known to have materials in existance which GTW64 is aiming to bring to the forefront.
Hopefully in time we’ll be able to find everything that there is to find and document about the series, and close the case on this one.
Meantime was a new RPG being developed by Interplay for the Apple II and PC, with a view to porting the Apple II version to the C64, like with Wasteland which was released in 1988 by Electronic Arts.
The plot involved stopping a set of bad guys from screwing up time by changing important events throughout history. A kind of a "Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure" style plot in many ways (It certainly inspired this RPG.)
The game was not a sequel to Wasteland, but used the very same engine. Overall the game was worked on for over 4 years and in that time there were a large amount of levels for the game. Unfortunately during the long time period of constructing the game and using the 1987 Wasteland engine, by 1992 the game was looking very dated, and Ultima VII had just been released (Blowing Meantime completely out of the water). The Apple II was also at the end of its life, and this was the main development version before later porting to C64 and PC. To bring up to scratch, the game would have had to have been redone to complete against the latest titles of the time. As a result the game was sadly cancelled.
When asked about the game’s existance, Bill Dugan sadly didn’t have any of the source disks. The remains are likely to reside in an old desk somewhere that Interplay once owned. Maybe Alan (If he was involved on the game) still has something of it left?
Additionally – The C64 version would likely have been ported from the Apple II version once the Apple II version was complete. There is a small possibility that a test port was done, and we hope to find out soon if this was the case.
For now, check out Creator Speaks to hear what Bill Dugan and Becky Heineman had to say from their own point of view about the game.
Yet another title which suffered from the death of the C64 in the early 90’s.
Monster Business was a promising mixture of Bubble Bobble and Dig Dug combined with modern day game elements to bring it into the 90’s.
Two months into the game, and already the game was playable with the main character moving around and being able to play the game. According to Oliver, the character still needed work and the character could not run on slopes and levels were missing.
Sadly, the crew’s publisher wholesaler denied any royalties, which downheartened the teams will to carry on with the title, and so it was cancelled.
Music was fully composed by Markus Schneider, and was re-used in a game called Turn It 2 by Ascon/Tale, and another of the tunes was used elsewhere. Both files can be downloaded above.
The game is available in its final form, and has not been completely lost. However, Markus does not wish for the game to be released in any form, so all we will be able to see for the foreseeable future is the set of graphics which Oliver drew for the game. This gives us a glimpse of what might of been.
No searching as such, but hopefully more information in the near future, maybe from Markus himself…
An interesting idea which sadly never fully made it…
Probably one of the last major lost titles left to find on the Commodore 64 – Murder! by US Gold. Finished and reviewed in 1990, but never released by the Birmingham-based company. The bloody cheek of them!
That is the strange thing with this mysterious title – it was fully reviewed for the C64 across all magazines of the time with good scores across the board. Reviewers loved it, and for a good reason – it was a solid isometric murder mystery which would keep you playing for a long time, with its randomly generated mysteries. The C64 edition had solidly converted over from the Amiga and was pretty much completely intact – even featuring sounds which almost sounded like samples, according to one reviewer.
Amiga/ST lead versions were written and designed by Grant Harrison and Jason Kingsley of Kingsley Harrison – a short-lived collaboration which pretty much only lasted for this one project. A shame, as Murder seemed to show a lot of promise for the partnership.
Contact was originally made some years ago with both Grant Harrison and Jason Kingsley who confirmed the game’s complete status, and both were dismayed at learning that the C64 version was not actually released or out there in any shape or form. It was news to them. Grant did not complete the C64 version, but was willing to try and find a C64 disk of the game for GTW. Sadly he did not find anything of the game.
It was however an external freelancer in the shape of Chris Walsh, who did the majority (if not all) of the C64 version programming. Wayne Billingham informed GTW that the mystery C64 coder was Chris back in 2005, the coder of Neverending Story 2 and Sleepwalker for Ocean no less! Chris was a sort of freelance C64 developer that dipped in and out of various companies, and Murder was another conversion job for him to bring in some funds and pay the bills.
The C64 game – taunting everyone who ever read the reviews
Chris Walsh confirmed to GTW that the game was completed, and was quick to say that he thought the game was actually released. He also confirmed that the graphics were done by him, porting all of Jason Kingsley’s original Amiga graphics pixel by pixel in Dpaint.
Once the game was finished – he passed on the finished version to Bob Armour and Tony Porter after completing everything and that was the last of it. Chris was paid and moved onto his next project (which was likely Neverending Story 2).
Bob Armour and Tony Porter revealed that they had nothing of the game unfortunately. Chris was also never given a full copy of the game – but then we soon learn why that was probably the case further below.
Interestingly, Chris confirmed that the game was NEVER a multi-load… once the game was loaded, that was it! No more tape/disk accessing apart from saving/loading save games. This suggests to us that the game shouldn’t have been a problem releasing on tape or disk, and have caused any mastering problems. Unless Chris had written a loader which Ablex couldn’t handle – but then US Gold would have sorted it or got Chris back in i’m sure.
Pete Weighill tracked down an advert of the game some years back. There it details the C64 version as being disk only. The manual scans which we added later also showed Disk only loading instructions for the C64 (which, yes – were still included regardless of the C64’s non-appearance) – nothing at all about a tape version, which is just bizarre based on Chris’ recollections.
The advert for the game
Investigating through magazines, there was a company called “Premier Mail Order” within Zzap 64, who for months after the review didn’t have any reference to the C64 edition on sale (nor did any other sellers!). The Amiga version was listed for a bit, with some delays it seems! Oddly though, in early 1991 – Murder was added to the C64 list at £9.99 on disk and was present for around 4-5 months in every advert! Did they really have a small stack of the game in stock??
Over the years we have attempted to contact various sources to find the game… including Centresoft, which would have been the distributor. Magazine reviewers from the likes of Commodore Format and Zzap 64 were all contacted – all confirming that nothing was kept from those days. Quite possibly with Zzap, when the Newsfield stock was sold off via the liquidators, the review copy may have gone to someone, but chances of finding that disk are how likely now do you think? Maybe Rik Henderson from Your Commodore still has his review copy? … Nope, all that kind of thing now long gone and ditched.
We’ve contacted many from US Gold, including various ex-managers, production guys, mastering teams and the game testing team, which included Simon Hadlington – who, along with the others had never seen the C64 edition at all. Most people who we spoke to who could recall anything about the game, just talked of the 16-bit editions – they were baffled that a C64 edition even existed at all.
Bob Kenrick was head of production at the time, and was the only person who could fully confirm the fate of the C64 edition out of everyone (to a point!). Bob confirmed to GTW64 that the decision was made at US Gold not to release the C64 edition at all. But frustratingly so many years had passed that it couldn’t be recalled why that decision was actually made.
Via an old website archive, we also found a chap called Mark Silveste who talked about trying to buy the C64 version via mail order in the UK back in 1990, only to be told that the C64 edition had been withdrawn and was never released – confirming pretty much that not even a small production run was made (ala Gauntlet 3), and that the Premier Mail Order listing could well have been in error. An ironic error though none the less!
Reviewing the evidence…
So based on our years of digging and research – lets review the evidence we have so far:
The game was a single load (according to developer – though getting mixed up with another game perhaps?)
The C64 edition followed the ST/Amiga editions, which were the lead versions – so the C64 edition would have been started later, and likely finished a bit later.
The game was completed and handed over to production at US Gold by the developer
The game started off as being developed on an Amiga linked to a C64, and at the last minute was ported over to a PC based PDS system. This was the version handed over to US Gold.
It received solid reviews across the board from the press, and was reviewed at the same time as the ST/Amiga editions
The released box and manual included references to the C64 version throughout
The advert included the C64 edition
The testers never saw the C64 edition at all (one unit at US Gold, all confirming they only saw the 16-bit edition).
The C64 was still doing very well commercially, and US Gold would go on to release games into late 1992 for the machine.
Various sources suggest that the ST/Amiga/PC versions all bombed in the sales charts
Amiga/ST/PC budget Kixx releases came out in mid 1993 time. C64 budget titles were still being released well into June/July that year (Pirates, Robocod etc)
What we believed happened…
From the above, we believe that there was an inevitable delay with the C64 version being completed – a result of likely being started after the 16-bit editions and following their lead. Amiga/ST versions were the lead versions, they would have been play-tested internally at US Gold during actual development, and feedback would have gone back to Jason Kingsley and Grant Harrison to make fixes/changes.
The C64 edition would likely have been quite far from completion at those stages, so that version would have to come later. It is very possible that the testers were also focusing on playability aspects of the game, and not the quality of conversion to other systems. It could well have been thought that there was no point in testing a C64 edition as a result, so testing focused just on the 16-bit editions.
With the ST/Amiga versions likely completed first – they would be most likely put on sale as soon as possible – maybe a few weeks or more before Zzap and CF would get their reviews published. The box/manual would be the same for all versions, so there was no harm in pushing ahead.
During the weeks that the game could have been on sale, the C64 edition will likely have caught up and been completed at this stage. Around the same time, Danielle Woodyatt needs to go out to the press and deliver review copies of the game (as well as organize a murder mystery event to promote the game). The C64 edition at this stage was either just about complete, or a close to completion and untested version was given out to the press by Danielle. It could well have just required some polish (i.e. prep for mastering), but was probably considered to be good enough for review.
Around the same time – the game goes on sale on the 16-bits. Adverts were already in magazines, reviews were coming out – so the public would be aware of the title in late September 1990. The C64 edition is likely just being polished off now for public consumption or making master-able, so there is a short period where just the 16-bit editions are on the shelves. Maybe for a week or so, or more perhaps – who knows?
During this short period – sales look to have been completely abysmal, as reported by some sources. The game doesn’t seem to be charting very well at all (non-existent on the C64 too). Possibly due to the higher price point of the game compared to other titles, this may have put off buyers perhaps. Regardless of that – things were likely so poor that the distribution/sales/production teams at US Gold decided to cancel mastering of the C64 edition. Just shortly before this decision, its likely that Chris Walsh had handed over a complete master to production manager, Bob Armour. On a disk? We’re not sure and no-one can remember.
US Gold was a business don’t forget, and throwing away a complete game would likely have not raised any eyebrows when there was a belief that money could be lost from it. But you could argue that a business savvy company would see opportunity to reap some money back via a compilation or budget release – i’m not sure why this never really happened. Mega Twins almost got out via compilation possibly – but I don’t think Murder made any compilations on any format?
Tony Porter suggests that the last issue that usually stood in the way of a game’s release, was the mastering phase. Committing to tape/disk with copy protection would often cause a non-release of a game, and is what happened to Gauntlet 3 of course. Tony confirmed that it was not uncommon for review code to be sent or taken out on disk, often in a pre-release format and often weeks before it was finally committed to finished media and protected.
But it is interesting that a tape edition was never mentioned in the press or reviews, even though it was perfectly possible. This is something that doesn’t really make any sense, but maybe they just assumed it would never get squeezed onto tape, and Chris surprised them by doing it?
It does seem odd for US Gold to do just a disk release, but maybe the production team didn’t realize it could have been released onto tape? Maybe with the poor 16-bit sales, they knew that C64 disk only sales would be very low, and not worth doing. It may have been very different if it was known early on that a tape version was available.
What about a KIXX budget release though? Well, the 16-bit editions didn’t see a budget release until mid 1993 – by which point US Gold had already left the 8-bit computer market. Had it been in 1992, there was a remote chance they could have finally released it then – something which had also been considered for Mega Twins, but not implemented. Why so late? Again, we’re not sure – but that delay in a budget release could well have been the final nail in the coffin for any chance of the game eventually making it out.
Conclusions + finding the game
This could well be the game that defeats GTW64, though we thought the same with Daffy Duck, and look how that panned out. It would be foolish to ever give up on the possibility that some day the game could be saved, but lets be honest – it isn’t looking too great at the moment. The leads remaining are pretty much now non-existent, with a large checklist of people/sources chased now done.
With Daffy Duck, we were incredibly lucky that the people involved kept hold of things due to the sentiment. With Chris Walsh, the development work was just a job, and as a result is probably why he never kept hold of any of his development disks. Other sources checked haven’t proved fruitful either, and we’ve chased many avenues – even ones which we almost knew wouldn’t result in anything.
We did wonder if there was any link at all to Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. When you compare, there is a visual similarity between the games, and even Zzap!64 made a comparison back to Murder! in an early preview in issue 77. The artist for that game was Nick Cook, who ironically had worked with Grant Harrison on Super Monaco GP in 1991. Was there any link? No. Nick confirmed he had nothing to do with the game.
There are but just a few small leads left before we become completely stuck, and unable to move forward any further with our search. Unless one of the chaps we have spoken to already manages to unearth something amazing, screenshots might be all we have…
Based on the Capcom coin-op. It featured two brothers who carry swords and had to cross various platform levels to kill the dragon which killed their Father. The C64 conversion was temptingly to feature the original two player mode of the arcade, so most was seemly going to be retained of the original to make a fantastic conversion.
A preview in Commodore Format showed us some promising looking images of the game taking shape and talked of how good the main sprite animates and the game looks like a winner. But with confirmation from Games X that Tiertex were behind the conversion, were we doomed and would we see a pretty crap result as usual?
Well, we never did anyway…US Gold however seemed to pull the plug on the game after around 6/7 months work (approximately).
The 16-bit versions did apparently make it out, but the 8-bit versions were all scrapped (Including the Amstrad version.. which looked gorgeous!). It seems likely, because all the 8-bit versions were scrapped, that US Gold at that point pulled out of the full price market and milked what was left with their KIXX label.
An Amstrad review (of an unreleased game, and unfinished!) also included a C64 screenshot for some strange reason, but it happens to be a very high quality one for you to see most of the game’s detail. So we’ve added it.
After 6 years of research trying to find out who in Tiertex was behind the game, we weren’t getting very far. But that all changed in May 2005…. Games TM magazine published a small write up on Armalyte 2, and featured GTW’s web address. A Wayne Billingham saw the article, and checked the site out… It was here he then discovered the game he did the artwork for…. Mega Twins!
Wayne then provided the other key detail we were missing as well as the artist… The Coder…. which was none other than Mike Ager, the developer of Orcus and many other classic C64 titles. Both Wayne and Mike previously worked together by porting the great Alien Storm game to the C64, which they did a superb job for Tiertex, a first decent game by the company!
Right after Alien Storm, both guys were assigned to the creation of Mega Twins on the C64, and progress was very good. Everything was looking to be retained, and with both guys being fans of Capcom’s work, they were enjoying working on this title.
What is quite shocking is that Wayne confirms that the game was fully completed before he left Tiertex, or at least the graphics were!…. US Gold decided to leave the scene and milk the KIXX label it seems, not even deciding to release the full game on the KIXX label straight away. Strange!
In issue 21 of Commodore Format (June 1992), Mark Wyatt from Colchester asked the question we were all asking… just where the heck was the game? (And not surprisingly as CF were promising a review every month for a few months on their back pages). Well, interestingly Commodore Format responded and gave a bit of an insight with US Gold which sounds a few alarms:
“Every month we ring US Gold and they tell us that the game is in final testing. So we put it on the innermost ring of the scanner. Then it doesn’t show for review and we ring the Goldies and they say that it is still in final testing. The result of this is that the game has been virtually ready for review for three months, a position the scanner has mirrored.
This is in no way a criticism of the Goldies though. They want to make sure that Mega Twins is as good as possible and won’t release the title for review or sale until it meets their high quality standards. It’s annoying to have to wait for so long, but when the wait is for the sake of improved quality, it can only be for the best in the long run. So we’ll review it when USG are happy with it” … It obviously never appeared and US Gold were pulling the wool over CF’s eyes.
In June 1992, it was clear that US Gold were beginning to wind down their C64 operations. Indy and the Fate of Atlantis had just been released, and all that was remaining was the release of Street Fighter 2 in a few months time. This was it though.
Maybe US Gold decided that they were not making enough on the platform and just to make one final bit of cash on two big licences they had already spent the money on and that was that. Certainly the Spectrum and Amstrad versions never made it either and only the 16-bit versions surfaced – so this seems to be the case. Crazy though to ditch a game which was apparently complete and not even try and get *something* back from it via a budget release (Which US Gold continued to do for at least a year after they ceased their full releases).
Very unfortunate, as from the sounds of things and following on from the success of Alien Storm, Mike and Wayne had a conversion which could have stunned people… Wayne offered a glimmer of hope for GTW though back around 2008…
Wayne dug out his Mega Twins disks and passed them onto GTW and although sadly no executable was found, we *DID* find a load of graphics which covers the scans which we have! No maps, but I will be reconstructing all the scans with the data I have.
6r6 has also very kindly produced a special sprite demo to demonstrate all the sprites which were found. There are loads of other bits not fully reconstructed yet, such as the Mega Twins logo (Which has a sprite overlay according to Wayne) and some other graphic bits. You can see that Wayne’s graphics were fantastic!, this would have been a great little conversion!
Unfortunately Mike Ager has never responded to any of our messages regarding the game, so we are left to just leave this message to Mike (in case he ever comes across these pages):
“Dear Mike – it would be an honour to preserve your work as part of our preserving our UK games history. Already we have gone to great lengths to try and preserve your work, by recovering all of the demos of Orcus and the graphical assets for Mega Twins – but we’ve hit a point where we have found as much as we possibly can.
Unfortunately many games are being lost all the time, due to there being no concern over this aspect of history in comparison to the film and music industry – and all of what we do now to preserve the history of gaming is in our limited spare time. Already we’ve started having trouble preserving particular tapes or disks as they start to decay, so try as much as we can to ensure as much of our gaming history will be available to future generations.
We can’t save everything, but your C64 work is highly regarded by many and it would be brilliant to see what remains of Orcus and Mega Twins that you were developing at the time – maybe even see them finished off! Certainly what with the Amstrad and Spectrum Mega Twins being recovered in recent years, it seems a shame the C64 version can’t be found as well, especially before the media it sits on deteriorates for good.”
Lets just hope that this is another Solar Jetman case… Could we now find an executable preview?… or even a full game? … It might sadly be down to Wayne or someone completely random to come forward with the goods…
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