Games That Weren't^®

Fans of games such as Lode Runner may have been familiar with a particular title released by Magic Disk, called "Golden Pyramids" – created by Harold Klink and Martijn Althuizen back in 1990/91. This was their first proper commercial release (although Dying High – their other game – just missed out from a Zzap 64 covermount), and it did quite well and had a good reception.

It was almost by default that a sequel would start to emerge, though it wasn’t really common knowledge to anyone in the gaming world. This was done pretty much underwraps by the developers in the hope that they would sell the game like the first.

Golden Pyramids 2 was to feature much of the first game, but with new levels and various visual and playability enhancements throughout. It was also considered briefly about including a level editor with the game, which would have been quite nice.

Sadly interest with the game’s development was lost and it fell by the way-side as Harold and Martijn moved away from the C64. Both guys had however done a fair amount of work, including a few levels and some of the playability. Martijn did also a great deal of graphical work for introductions and end sequences.

All of this was left to gather dust, until in 2006, GTW got in touch with developers regarding Dying High. This also led to other titles which never saw the light of day, including all the disks in relation to the Golden Pyramids 2 project. With kind permission from Harold and Martijn, as well as a complete collection of what we found on the work disks – we also include the source disks incase anyone wants to examine and maybe do something with the code.

So GTW is proud to present another game once lost and now found. A big thanks to Skeletor for piecing together the remains for GTW. Enjoy and check out what could have been a nifty sequel.

One tomb that has been exhumed and opened…

Ah… I remember going up to London one day and my dad buying me a copy of Your Commodore on the train journey up to keep me quiet. It happened to be the last ever issue as it happened, and on the covermount were some memorable games for me and my childhood. One such title was “Gold Train”, which was a slightly odd title and there always seemed to be a bit of mystery behind it which troubled me for many years.

You play the game and one thing you’ll notice is that it has no sound or music at all… like it is unfinished. The title screen has the original 1984 date to indicate that this was in fact something never released until now. The game itself was fully playable, and seems to be an unofficial arcade conversion of Taito’s 1982 game Wild Western.

Many years later in 2008… I found Gold Train and had a play for old times sake. The questions still remained to me about the game and why it wasn’t released in 1984. I dug around in a machine code monitor, and finally the mystery was starting to unravel itself. The programmer, Richard Taylor had left a message in the game to say that it was meant for Interceptor Software and it was unfinished. Ah ha!… we were in fact looking at yet another GTW, and this time an Interceptor title!

We luckily managed to track down Richard who had the following story to tell…

“Well this is the ‘story’ of Gold Train. Back in 1983 there was a little group of us c64 owners that used to get together to try and design and write games. One of the gang knew Richard Paul Jones from Interceptor Micros. He was a few years older than us, about 18/19 I think. He was cool, friendly and encouraging. He said he’d buy games from us if we produced them to a certain standard. He saw Gold Train and several others in very early stages.

He wanted to buy them and he gave us each a cheque for about £500. It seemed like a lot of money back then! Esp to a 13 year old. One day a disk got dropped off with some music on it. You might be right about the author, but sadly I can’t remember. We put the music into the game. I think it was Camptown Races, or something similar! A little while later a couple of posters turned up for the game, and also some dummy cassette cases with printed sleeves. There was a horse with agonised look on face jumping a ravine, and Injuns firing arrows at a train. Great artwork! I probably still have that at my mums house.

Richard Jones wanted lots of changes made to the game. More shooting, more challenging obstacles. Looking back I can see his point. He wanted it all done by a certain date, in time for a computer show in London. He showed us other games he wanted to demo, like China Miner. It was really colourful and made our graphics look bad. Bizarely he also wanted reference made to camels, llamas and goats, as seemed to be a feature of Interceptor games at the time.

There was a bit of a falling out over his demands. It was a mistake to take money for the game so early on. Our ‘team’ disbanded as people went to college. I tried to finish the game for Jones in early 1984 but it fell by the wayside. To RPJ’s credit he let us keep the money originally paid. I remember him saying later that he was disappointed over Gold Train, as it was one of the best games he had ever seen, great potential.

He was a nice guy. Friendly, enthusiastic. He got some bad press for appearing arrogant. But that’s just business.”

So there we have it!… it seems we have pretty much all of the game that was done… but a mention of music got us thinking. And the Camptown Races connection…. We root around Chris Cox’s music archive and find that his Fistful of Bucks set of tunes for Ocean about a year later in 1985 contain a rendition of Camptown Races. It seems that the tune for Ian Gray’s game was in fact meant for Gold Train!… maybe the sub tunes too? We will need to find Chris Cox or Ian Gray someday to find out more.

Additionally Richard spoke about cover art for the game being produced… and he has kindly offered to take a look when he’s next at his parent’s house to see if anything still exists. And it does! In the images section below are a set of photos of Richard’s mastered disk copy. It is believed that the game will have the completed music, so we hope to see a copy of it made soon to preserve as well as full scans.

A great story to a long buried game… and we hope there is more to it soon!

A popular game on the Amiga in its early days, the C64 saw a conversion preview released of the game. I don’t know much about the game itself, apart from its recievement on the Amiga, and it mean’t to be rather good.

This is only a preview, with music taken from a Rob Hubbard track (Human Race), and has some graphics done by Steven Day (Ste’86 to old Compunet nuts).

Steve actually spoke to GTW and gives the reason for this preview, and explains more to sum up everything…. “Sorry to dissappoint you, but this ‘preview’ was actually only a spoof demo for Compunet done by the Meanteam. I know because if u read the credits on the title screen (if they are still there) it says coding by JCB & Claka, title screen by BJ and in game graphics by STE’86 (guess who i am???)”

Therefore, this is all that exists of a conversion of the classic Goldrunner, even though its not technically an official version. Would have been great if the people behind Goldrunner actually saw this, and commissioned Meanteam to do the game.

Case closed on this one…

Before the classic times of Slicks and then Micro Machines, came games like Go Kart!, with some simple tracks and playability.

Go Kart is quite primitive when compared with Slicks, and is certainly not as slick as Slicks. Unfortunatly the controls are quite awkward, making the game slightly unplayable.

The graphics are also a little too basic, although they look ok on the second track (If only a little strange for a go-kart game). There is also no sound at all in this preview.

The tracks are selected before the preview is started, so the preview has been bolted together from other previews. The game includes a standard title screen also, which luckily had a credit which we can chase up in the future.

Were there any more tracks?, was there a later version with more cars and linked tracks? The author can hopefully answer this one day…

A nice little racer, marred by some dated graphics currently…

A hugely popular game from the Bitmap Bros on the Amiga and other 16-bit systems done way back in around 1991. Famous not only for the game itself, but for the music score for the game. In the year 2000, work was started on a unofficial C64 conversion, and a site was put up to show progress.

Eventually an intro was released, which contained some reasonable titles and a decent conversion of the GODS theme tune. Sadly there was nothing playable, until a while later.

Before the site disappeared, the team released a small preview of the map, and slightly playable version of level 1. Those who downloaded their Xmas demo and decoded a special message could be 1 of 10 potential beta-testers to test a later version of the game. It was reported that the game was around 50% complete overall (most of the code was done, just needing final maps and character designs).

Sadly, no-one seems to have either the early demo or the beta demo and therefore the intro is all that currently remains. Their website originally said the following:

“As you can see this is the Entire map to level 1-1, This is just the background map, there are another 2 maps that go with this as each level is built with 3 layers of maps, there are a background map, Interactive map & a baddie map, the interactive map is a map that contains things like AI pointers and switches, then of course the baddie map contains all the baddie locations and paths. Look out for a playable level 1-1 demo coming very soon.”

Thanks to the Wayback machine, here was the last update and invite for beta testers:

“MERRY XMAS – SPECIAL DOWNLOAD

The above download, is a WIP from 3 months ago, The Final version is A Whole FUCKLOAD nicer We are releasing this OLD demo now to keep scene interest.

Unzip, load the PRG into real or emulated 64 and type SYS 32768 (Return)

Feel Free to Email us about this, But keep in mind this is in no way a current wip. Alot of changes have been made since.

Beta Tester’s Req’d

Merry Christmas to every c64/128 freak out there. We are nearing the end of godz production, Phew! its been hard Everything is done, Music, Gfx, Code, AI, Its all there, However as we have played it to death we don’t know if its to hard or not hard enough anymore we need testers. so to make the selection process fair we have a plan :)

All you have to do is download our christmas greetingtro. load it up on your fave emulator (we recommend WinVice 1.6) and follow the instructions, it tells you all you need to know
Shortly after the festive season our new website will open up with the first public release of Godz. Hex (Me) is busy doing all the website material now (lots of shockwave).”

There were some rumors that development on Gods had been stopped, and Hexl0rd responded:

“Two of my colleagues work on it without me, but the development speed is slowing down. We are working always on GODS, we don’t give up the idea. I am working twice than before, and we will put up one new webpage with a demo with 3 levels.”

At the time, I remember many people thinking that Gods was nothing more than a fake production to drum up some interest in the scene. We had contact from a guy called Andy in 2006, who had spoken with Hexl0rd at the time and had seen a lot of the game. He confirmed it wasn’t fake as a result, and seemed like he was one of the beta testers. After promising to try and dig out the previews, they sadly disappeared (the old email address now bouncing).

According to Andy, the coder was struggling with the AI and sprite multiplexer in particular, and could have been why the game was abandoned in the end.

The likes of Hexl0rd, Marta and Ventura all seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth, so we hope they see this page some day to get in touch and shed some light on the development, and even share what remains of the game. The only other hope is if someone happened to download the early preview off the site or were one of the beta testers. If that was you – please get in touch!

Sadly, I recall downloading the map demo and running it – but I didn’t archive it at the time. From what I recall, it just had a very basic character that could move around a very simple map that scrolled in multiple directions. I can recall there being ladders dotted around. There were no enemies or sounds and it was quite dark/blue – like the colour scheme in the intro demo.

If you have old CD archives from around 2000-2001 time, then check them for anything that looks like “gods” or “gods.zip” (which was the download filename).

In the meantime, in late November 2023 (and after many searches across digital archives in the past), I made a small breakthrough. On our very own Jazzcat’s disks, we located a “GODS” file which seemed a decent size. When loading it up, it did nothing – so we tried the SYS code as mentioned on the old Gods web page. Unfortunately, we were greeted by the same (uncompressed/uncracked) intro sequence with digital music that has been floating around for some time.

Looking in the code – we noticed that there seems to be remnants of the game character set for level 1 first of all (which has probably been present in the intro release already out there).

However – lurking on the same disk was a file called “XMAS”, which also didn’t autorun when loading. Putting the same SYS code in, we were greeted by the Christmas demo which was mentioned, with the message that had to be decoded to become a beta tester.

So its something related to the development, and we’ve added it here – but still not the previews sadly. Couldn’t see anything else similar on the rest of Jazzcat’s disks. Hopefully some day we will find more.