Games That Weren't^®

A great looking preview by all means.

Metal Wars features bitmap scrolling, and looks really nice and detailed in this SEU. A lot like the graphical qualities of IO by Doug and Bob.

The preview which has been out there for some time, features about 4/5 levels worth of scrolling, with very little in the way of attack waves etc. Its graphically mostly done, but lacking on the playability side of things.

The game was being created by Henk Dekker and Robert Tan, who were big fans of SEU’s such as R-Type. They wished to create a space SEU which was as good looking as possible. The only problem is that although it looked like a work of C64 art, it lacked unpredictable attack waves. After what was a huge effort to try and complete, and for what needed a lot of work to be made great… Henk and Rob decided to call it a day on the awesome looking title.

The crew were also known for their Amiga activities, as mentioned in the preview note. This is what happened, and both guys moved onto that machine.

Had the game been completed, Henk tells GTW that they would have sold it to a company. If this had been finished, it certainly would have raised a few eyebrows.

So is there more to this game?… Sadly not, this is it. Henk has confirmed this version of the game to be the most complete. So check out a piece of C64 history and dream of what could have been…

A sad loss…

XLCUS has done a lot for the Commodore 64 scene in its hour of need… As the C64 was dying… Paul Kubiszyn was busy producing as many quality titles as possible. Even though sadly it was not quite enough to save the scene commercially… Paul, along with others, kept a steady flow of new and exciting titles.

Along the way, Paul had a few casulties with his releases.. and Mega Molecules is one of them which makes its way into the GTW vault.

Mega Molecules is the result of a piece of code created after the days of Commodore Format Powerpack games, and was created in mind to be part of a demo or a little stand alone game in its own right.

After sitting on a disk for many years, it wasn’t until Richard Bowen of ex-Commodore Scene magazine saw it and asked about using it on their covermount. Paul agreed, and set to work tidying up the game and creating levels to make the game playable.

Even though not a completly finished or polished game, it was something new and quite playable. Featuring some simplistic graphics, effect speech like sounds and ever so simple playability. You just had to shoot the Molecules, in Crazy Comets fashion :)

This is all that remains of a little idea that never quite made it to a proper game, but did make it into a little game for the readers of Commodore Scene. Read Paul’s own account on the game in "Creator Speaks".

Case closed…

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. ;-)

A neat platformer with unusual atmosphere…..

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.