Games That Weren't^®

It Came From Hell was to be a sequel to the cool Bomber game that was given away with Commodore Format many moons ago. This was to feature the same kind of thing, but with vastly improved graphics.

Shaun recently found his work in 2011, and mentioned the following in the production notes on CSDB:

"Created pre 1997:
Vidcom 64/Omega [1986]
Released 2011

Some graphics created for "It Came From Hell" aka: Bomber II
The whole scene was inspired heavily by the Robert Williams painting "Appetite for Destruction".

The plan was to have an orange monster rise up from behind a fence, and begin spitting out mini skull and crossbones. The Player would be required to catch the skull and crossbones using a contraption linked to the centre of the Earth. Failure to capture a skull and crossbones would have resulted in the mini creature to hit the pavement and exit the screen to either the left or right, and contaminate the Earth.

The I.C.F.H. Logo was to be displayed over the Background using sprites. The Logo would have alternated with a Hi-Score Table.
The I.C.F.H. Logo was included as part of Forgotten and Found 2, although I also appears during GFX-Col.1 [logos]

The Background was deliberately drawn to be easy on the eye, and use pastel shades of colour, to contrast with the Sprites.

I was never really happy with the original Bomber graphics as they were created in a hurry. "It Came From Hell" graphically offered a better game.
Sadly no code ever happened."

Unfortunately as a result, this is it!…. graphics for a project abandoned before any code could be written. It is an interesting glimpse though of what may have been, and we assume what could have been a covermount game for Commodore Format very late in the day.

Case closed!

Another potential great from the Italian game giants Simulmondo, and a nice looking icon driven adventure game. Unfortunately, you can only look at was going to be, as the preview is only a rolling demo, featuring two shots of the actual game.

I haven’t actually seen this game mentioned in any press over here in the UK, but maybe someone from Italy has heard more on this game, possibly from the Italian version of Zzap!64?

Well, GTW received some information that the game was to be a kind of action adventure which was heavily influenced by the movie Blade Runner. A few preview shots at the time were actually scans from publicity photos of the movie.

According to rumours, Simulmondo got into a bit of trouble over a deal with a book publisher. Italian Night 99 got caught up in the mess, and was never to be seen again. It was rumoured that Italian Night 99 was a faked game, but Marco Das found an advert in 1000 Miglia for the game (see scans), with text that translated as follows:

Italian night 1999
Milan, February 18, 1999
Subject: Assignment # 220 (on accident investigation)
Investigator: R. Duomo (CYBORG SIMULATED)
Investigation # 220 commissioned by Carmen Erni, P.za S. Ambrogio 4
Informations about the event: See attachments
Note: The deadline for the handing over of the report: 08.00 of 19 February 1999
Dynamic: Beware off cyberpunks and interactive women
GOOD WORK AGENT CATHEDRAL

Dr Strange/Atlantis in late 2014 confirmed with the author that the project was dropped just after the first preview was released. No further development was made on the game. It was dropped due to lack of time and interest. Sadly any development disks with the game are long gone, so this is pretty much all that now exists.

Interestingly though, an Amiga version was released – though planned Atari ST and PC editions were never to be seen either like the C64 edition.

In late August 2021, Martin/Stadium64 got in touch to provide a rare scan of a newsletter that was released by Simulmondo that talks about Italian Night 1999 – now added to the archive.

Pretty much a closed case now!

Game confirmed as finished and released … http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=7279&d=18&h=0

Case closed!

Another game in the same week released by Hermit Software, and just as with their Mortal Kombat 2 conversion, they stun again with Island of monsters.

The game was started by Hungarian crew Hermit Software back in 1998, and unfortunately was never to be finished. However, a good chunk of the game is infact playable where you can fight in a Barbarian 2 style game with awesomely detailed graphics throughout. The main characters in the game especially are very well defined.

In addition to the playable parts, there is a really nice animated introduction sequence which overall gives this preview some real polish compared to some unreleased titles we have in the GTW vaults.

We’re not entirely sure why the game was cancelled, but we are convinced it was done as a labour of love for the machine. There is rumour that the developer sold his C64, and only recently got one back in around 2001, where he was able to dig out some of his unreleased works.

This is a fantastic preview which will impress you very much and is certainly well worth seeing! We hope to learn more about it soon!…

A fantastic preview of a fantastic looking game…

Found hiding on a bunch of old Compunet disks by Viktor Vargor came this interesting little preview of a Submarine game by none other than Mike (Kernal) Berry, who later went on to create Boing!, Reckless Rufus and the other GTW, Savage Platforms.

How did we know it was by Mike?… Well, hazarded a guess and apart from the fact that the disk image had Mike’s name, it was also full of all his demos and nothing else. Oh, and Mike himself confirmed that this was his game :-)

The game simply consists of a 2/3 sprite yellow submarine on a single screen with a bit of scenary. I imagine that the game would have later scrolled and been similiar to Airworf, but underwater.

This preview is lacking on playability, and the main ship is the only thing that is interactive. The coloured blocks present are there for testing the collision detection, which it seems Mike must have been trying to tweak at the time.

When asked about the game, Mike gave said

"Iron Fish wasn’t really marketed for anyone really. I knocked it up during a day of particular boredom.

I had fancy ideas about creating fancy water effects and giant mechanical fish (a little like the one in Stingray!). I think I probably only spent about 2-3 days on it maximum, then life go in the way :)"

So that was it, the game never progressed any further and never got offered to any companies. Surely it would have done had the game been finished. This was merely a project which Mike started and lost interest in, as do many programmers with various projects.

The game essentially is a lost relic of Mike’s programming past, and is a small indication of some of the early thoughts that Mike had during his C64 coding time. A shame it never got complete, but there you go :)

All that remains is a main sprite and test gfx… Case closed…

In-Zane is a neat little preview, which is in a very early stage, but already shows some promise. It is a kind of Sonic/Mario game, scrolling in one direction where you control a robotic guy on tracks.

You can jump and spin in Sonic fashion and kill a limited set
of enemies over a early set of background graphics. This occurs for a short while, until you literally hit a brick wall, and have to start again. It’s quick, but already this shows a game which might have been quite nice to play had it been completed.

There could well be more, though we need to find out. We at least have some developer names so we can try and find out more about what happened to it. It was being developed for Everlasting Style, which I think were based in Australia?…

Graphics are good and functional, though they may have been improved in the final game, music is very good by D Bakewell.

Overall, a nice preview to check out for the time being…