Games That Weren't^®

Many moons ago as the C64 was resurging through fanzines, Godflesh was announced to the world as a new beat-em-up in production by First Blood Entertainment in 1996. Previously doing a few other games, this sounded particularly exciting.

Sadly nothing was really ever heard about this game, and it was soon forgotten about. It was assumed that interested was lost, and so was the game.

In recent years, we obtained some exclusive screenshots of the game, but only seemingly bitmap stills of the game, and no action at all.

There is no playable feature though sadly at the moment. And now after many years of mystery, we can solve the game’s mystery…

The game was to be a IK / Mortal Kombat game, with 12 characters, and very ambitious ideas and excellent graphics. Most of the plans and graphics were drawn up, but sadly a coder could not be found to produce the game, so nothing was really developed apart from maybe a few sprites/test routines.

Jazzcat was the main designer behind the project, and has been hoping for years that the game would have been started and finished, but it was not to be. Jazzcat therefore has specially compiled all the remains specially for GTW for exclusively release for the first time. This special download includes a lot of unseen graphics, and possibly some unheard music by Geir Tjelta.

There was a lot more, including sprites and other graphics and documentation, but sadly this was all lost in a house fire. So what we have here is all we believe that remains of the game. Also included are a set of scans which depict some of the cover/documentation artwork by Duce.

So this is it really… a set of concept graphics to indicate what was being thought about.. but not quite enough to get excited about sadly. It is however another entry which will get people thinking "What if", as with many titles in the archive. Could more be found?… Remote… but you never know… but its most likely only ever gonna be sprites… so you could say that what is here is everything, and this therefore a closed case.

End of the road for Godflesh, and another that got away…

A game promoted heavily in Denmark, a blatant Rampage clone that sadly would never get a proper release. Is it because Activision stepped in and stopped them, or did Kele Line go under before they could get the game out?

Luckily a preview somehow sneaked out, which is likely a glimpse of how far the game had got. Although buggy with test code on the screen, it plays very well and has some neat presentation effects throughout. This could well have bettered the UK version of Rampage. Thanks to Ole Mogensen, we found out the developer names, which are those from previous Kele Line games.

Although it seemed likely that Activision stepped in and put a stop to the game, this wasn’t the case. Carsten Holløse from World Games confirmed to us that Activision never went after them, and that it probably never even got onto their radar. Carsten informs us that they even did a launch party for the game based on the demo (that we are now hosting), and Carsten is the guy dressed in the monkey suit in the scans we have below.

We also got hold of Torben Bakager Larsen, who was a producer at Kele Line, and he believed that the coder had to dump the project to finish his school work. Torben wasn’t sure if there was more to the game, but it is believed that this could well be it. Torben did however dig out the original artwork intended for the game’s cover, and has very kindly provided us with a scan to put on the site, which you can now see within the gallery.

In recent years, it was found via a SOFT magazine article in 1987, that the development team left Kele Line and went to World Games to get their game made. There was also a credit listed to the late Johannes Bjerregaard for the music.

An article in IC-RUN 1988 confirms that Viet signed a contract with World Games to finish the game there, but there was no release date. German-based Ariolasoft were to release the game too. When Viet went to finish his education, World Games tried to get another young programmer to finish it off (name cannot be recalled unfortunately), but it was never to be and little progress was ever made beyond the demo we have here.

The crack of the preview was released in 1989, by Rooze – who may have been friends with Viet at the time. Hopefully we might be able to contact Viet in the future to find out more.

I always regret not growing up when the likes of "Ghosts and Goblins" came out on the C64, and being able to go out and buy the game as soon as it was launched…

I could have possibly gone out and bought "Gory Ghost" though, a clone of the classic game which was being worked on in the late 80’s… sadly as with many in GTW, this was never completed or released anywhere.

Apart from looking very similiar to the Elite classic conversion, the game plays nowhere near as good and has a number of bugs and bad pieces of gameplay.

The preview takes place over a reasonably sized one level map, before finishing. You are able to shoot bullets at various enemies, and jump over numerous platforms.

This would have likely bombed at full price level, if there hadn’t been much to improve over Ghosts and Goblins, but possibly would have done fairly well on budget.

This obscure little title is so, because no credits are present to tell us who actually worked on this game.. so finding out more about this game is on a slow slide for now…

A game crying out for Chris Butler to save…

A puzzler game with our next entry which existed first as a splash screen and some graphics. The game involves you controlling a virus and having to kill a mainframe using some sort of "VOS" (Virus Operating System) from the command line.

The idea of this game was born in Teonaki’s head, he wanted to create a game in which the player would play the role of a deadly computer virus. In those days encounters with viruses were pretty common things. The game took third prize as well in a contest.

Details of the gameplay are quite scarce, but the game contains a screen which has a schematic map of a computer network with some terminals, and a main frame. Apparently the goal was to kill the main frame, through infecting machines. There was a central virus killer that removed infection from machines. According to the author – "It was a real nice real-time game."

The bottom part of the screen is occupied by some sort of a console. The player could execute commands there to control the virus, to infect another parts of the network. The commands were interpreted and executed or denied by the Virus Operating System.

Trying to remember the commands for the game, the developer lists the following commands:

* cls: Clears screen
* quit: Give up
* ver: Displays version info
* dir: Displays disk information of drive
* a: / c: (only on consoles): changes drive
* c1 – c12: changes console
* 1 / 2 / 3: changes local board
* cxx/y: changes console and board at the same time
* Some other command fragments I was able to discover, but was unable to use properly: brain, tape, hico ?, hide ?, track. I have absolutely no idea how you infect disks, machines, etc.

The game was found in a beta stage by the developer and has made its way out to the world. You can now download the preview and mess around with this interesting idea. Apart from bugs, its a playable title :-)

Go check it out…