Games That Weren't^®

Back in the summer of 1985, Ritchie Brannan was trying to break into the games industry, and got a gig producing a game based on Fantastic Voyage for Ariolasoft.

Early on it was renamed to Braindeath, probably as Ariolasoft couldn’t get the licence or something along those lines.

As you’d expect, the aim of the game was to go around the body, fixing valves and going down veins to travel around and kill off germs and so on.

Ritchie suggests that there was colour cycling to give the sense of movement, and veins could split to give a choice of direction around the body. Art work was provided by Paul Smith (of Viz Design fame), and the game almost completed.

However, Ritchie suggests that they may have been holding off publishing until all platform conversions were complete (to combine marketing), and during that period – they decided to pull out of the UK market before the game could be completed.

In a strange twist, we showed Ritchie another Fantastic Yoyage themed game from around the same time that never saw release. Ritchie responded that the graphics were certainly the same as what he had for his development.

It seems that there was an earlier development that had been started, but likely abandoned, and graphics from that project were passed over to Paul Smith (who then tidied them up slightly and added more graphics for Ritchie to utilize). Ritchie was never provided any code as a starting point and was never aware of this earlier development.

Ritchie offers some hope that we may be able to see the game some day – and if he finds his work disks, will be posting them down to GTW to preserve (if they still read). This could be a very fantastic voyage in itself.

A short entry for a title which was mentioned by Andrew Braybrook in an interview with FREEZE64.

After finishing Intensity, Andrew started another game design – but it wasn’t really shaped into a game or anything. A title sequence was set up, and the game was going to take place on a hexagonal grid.

However, the draw of the 16-bits was proving too strong, and so work was halted and focus shifted to other platforms. This particular game design was never taken any further, not even on another platform.

Andrew has suggested that there might be a disk lurking around somewhere, but it isn’t known if he would be open to preserving the demo and showing people. We will have to watch this space.

A short entry for yet another Mastertronic game which never saw the light of day.

This was a game based on the Pulse Warrior codebase, which according to developer Simon Price, “involved knocking robots off some sort of high rise – clearing a floor at the time”.

The final versions were delivered to Mastertronic for both the C64 and ZX Spectrum, and it was paid for – but then when taken over by Virgin, they axed both versions.

It would be amazing to find both full versions, so hopefully Simon can shed more light if anything has survived.