Games That Weren't^®

Following on from a series of 2000AD themed games, Halo Jones was the next in line from Piranha on their ambitious (And eventually fateful) climb forwards in the games market.

Halo Jones was rather different to the other titles, and was more a of Tir Na Nogg/Redhawk clone of sorts. From various screenshots seen of the game, it looked pretty good and coming together well. Ok, at least on the Spectrum it was looking ok – as the C64 version never got much of a mention, apart from being listed in the Piranha adverts as coming soon for the C64 as well as the Speccy.

Well, it seems that this game was also caught up in the downfall of Piranha like with Judge Anderson (Which at least something has sneaked out). Not even the nearly complete Spectrum game could quite sneak out it seems.

But just how much of a C64 conversion was started?… Nothing was ever seen in the likes of Zzap to the scale of what was seen on the Spectrum platform, so was it even started? Who developed it too?… Was it the same guys who did Judge Death?

Commodore User in April 1988 had the following to say…

“Where is she? We’ve been counting the moments until that wonderous woman, Halo Jones finally steps out of the pages of Alan Moore’s futuristic cartoon world, the Hoop, and onto the screens of a nation’s 64s/ It was back in December that we first told you that Halo was a comin’ your way, courtesy of Piranha. Eventually our daily weeping phone calls to Piranha HQ have yielded the following horrific information: The Ballad Of Halo Jones hasn’t even begun to be programmed on the 64.

The powers that be have decided in their wisdom to complete the Amstrad and (ughhh) Speccy versions before even embarking on the 64 work, so we won’t be likely to be seeing our ‘Alo much before June. June!! So, just to keep y’all going till then we thought we’d just print a glorious technicolour cut-out n stuff under your pillo pic of the woman herself.”

Well, Richard Hewison helps to confirm further that sadly the C64 version of Halo Jones was never actually started. Spectrum developer Mike Lewis confirmed that there never was a C64 version of Halo Jones. He had completed the Spectrum and Amstrad versions and delivered the master tapes the day that Piranha was wound up by MacMillan. The plan was to get a C64 version converted once the games were released… but it was never to be.

So this is it… another case which can sadly be closed. Nothing to find, apart from maybe a full Spectrum/Amstrad game some day soon. Mike Lewis was responsible for another game with a similiar engine which you can read about more on Richard’s website.

Case closed!…

Palace Software started as a division of the Palace Video company, which had a large shop in London and distribution rights to several horror films. This included The Evil Dead, and Palace’s first game was based on that film. However, with the press full of stories about “video nasties” and campaigner Mary Whitehouse urging the Government to clamp down on such titles, another Palace project was cancelled – Halloween, based on the John Carpenter film.

Chris Neary, who also did the graphics for The Evil Dead, talks about the cancellation.

“I did the graphics in about 1983 for The Evil Dead (Don’t laugh!) I was working on Halloween (from the film) and had it half finished when it was cancelled. Mary Whitehouse was doing a thing about XXX rated films so the distributers didn’t order many copies of The Evil Dead.

I remember a discussion in the office about purposefully making the game ‘cute’ rather than horrifying to avoid the X rated association. You have to remember the times, the games industry was in its infancy and the graphics were really limited. I don’t think that any company could have created a truly X rated game if they had wanted to. If you consider the graphic X rating of the games that are available these days to kids these days any 1980’s game was ‘cute’.

Sadly when the Halloween project was terminated I was under contract to return all the data back to the company and/or destroy that which I had. There was one hard copy of the programming that I wrote for it which I discovered in my parents loft about ten years ago, however it had faded quite badly and would not have had any of the graphics in it. I spent about 4 months developing Halloween but it never got past the project stage.”

Richard Leinfellner helped design Halloween, but in the end there was no game. Thinking about Halloween in general, he started work on a new idea – a game that would become Cauldron. As Chris points out:

“Interestingly a couple of the sprite graphics that I created for Halloween were reworked and appeared in Cauldron, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. Richard Leinfellner went on to greater things (he’s VP of EA now), but I eventually gave up programming in about 1988.”

As for what remains, Chris is not hopeful.

“It would only be code. Back then there weren’t any games development teams as such. Programmers were individuals, they created the code, the storyline, the AI, the graphics and the sound. Being the least favourite (at least for me), sound and graphics was usually left till last. Since the game was not completed there wouldn’t be much to look at.”

Thanks to a games historian, it was revealed that Steve Brown had worked on Halloween, when it was revealed in an interview with him in Retro Gamer Issue 23, where the following was recalled:

Palace had acquired the rights to the Halloween films, so Steve Brown’s first job was to design a tie-in game. “I worked on concepts and designs,” he says, “but a tiny eight-pixel high Michael Myers trundling around the screen with a kitchen knife just didn’t make much of a game. However, the pumpkins I’d drawn looked really cool and gave me the idea to take the game in a completely different direction.”

So, did Steve just do an early concept and then Chris take over later on? We hope to learn more in the future. This could be a tough one to find, but yet another Palace game to hunt for. Do you know any more about this game?…