Games That Weren't^®

Another title highlighted thanks to Peter Weighill. This early 1983 Epyx game was advertised in quite a few magazines at the time as part of a double pack with Seawolf 2. Unfortunately this one never got to see the light of day, even though the other game pack with Starfire and Fire One were released.

Gun Fight was an arcade game by Bally Midway, which saw two cowboys fighting each other from between a stage coach. Very simple affair, which was slightly dated even by 1983.

The advert used never specified any formats, but it was found that the pack of games was released on the Atari platform, and an Epyx brochure states that it was for the Atari only, with no mention of the Commodore platform. So why are we including it?

Well, we believe that it is very possible that Seawolf 2 could have been caught up due to Commodore publishing the first game on its cartridge. It’s possible that Epyx couldn’t get the licence on the C64, so abandoned the double pack. If this can be proven, it is possible that something may have been started on both games.

Very early days, and we could get confirmation soon – but another one to try and solve!

Thanks to Fabrizio Bartoloni for the heads up, we learn of yet another Commodore publisher game which never quite made it to the C64 in the shape of “Guardians of Time”, which was being created by none other than Andy Finkel.

The game was mentioned as unreleased in a 1996 interview with the developer from Commodore, but little else if anything was actually mentioned about the game.

In 2020, contributor Chris left some comments to feedback from details from Andy about the game.

According to Andy, the game was to be a 2D space shooter with a fortress in the middle of the screen. Whichever player had control of the fortress, they could reverse time to a previous point in the game that the player had picked. Using the power meant losing control of the fortress.

Andy had got as far as coding the game screens, ship display routines and physics engine before it was cancelled (for reasons we don’t yet know). The game design document was just work in progress, and no gameplay had been coded up.

Andy has offered hope that the design doc may still exist, but doubts that any code exists still. But who knows, hopefully if/when Andy takes a look he may find more than he bargained for.

Could something of the game be found?

Ground Zero was yet another text adventure created in 1984 by Artic Computing. Advertised for the likes of the Spectrum and the Commodore 64 in various magazines, only the Spectrum version seems to have surfaced.

The C64 version is very much at large, or even missing completely as a result of never getting completed (Gamebase64 have an entry listed as missing). We’re not entirely sure why, as a text adventure is relatively simple to convert and there were the likes of the Quill and GAC available to do the job.

So what happened?… did the Spectrum version not sell very well?

Contributor Strident commented: “Ground Zero was a Quilled game on the Spectrum, so it should’ve been a very easy title to port across. It was actually produced originally by the author, independently of Artic.

Before its publication by Artic, the adventure’s author, former journalist Colin Smith apparently planned to sell his house to raise capital to launch the game. “I thought that participating in the game would bring home to people the horrors of nuclear war more powerfully than any film or book,” Colin explained to a reporter at the time, with the game intended to highlight what he considered the ‘inadequacies’ of the Government Protect and Survive civil defence scheme.”

At present, we don’t believe that Artic sold the C64 edition at all, suggesting that nothing was completed, but was something started at least?

Among ZZAP!s best-known features is issue 16’s “The Musician’s Other Ball”. This was an interview with Ben Daglish, Tony Crowther, David Whittaker and Rob Hubbard, talking about composing music for games and how they got into it.

At the end of the article was a box listing musical credits for all the composers. Within Rob Hubbard’s list is a credit for the forthcoming “Gremlins”, an arcade-style game and not the Adventure International text adventure, even though Adventure International is referenced. Is it possible that Rob’s music was intended to go into the adventure game, but was dropped? Not quite – please read on.

There was a Gremlins arcade game, based on the Atari 5200/7800 game and released in 1984. However, it wasn’t known originally if Rob’s music was intended for this game or a separate release. However, Mat Allen confirmed that the game was indeed released by Atari for the C64, disk only and therefore was not the same game.

Chris Abbott in 2015 got in touch and confirmed as well that Rob’s music was not for the AtariSoft game, but another Gremlins title contracted and invoiced by an “R. Gibson”. This was the very same Roy Gibson who went on to found Canvas with Ian Weatherburn. The work was commissioned in 1985 for Rob to do, and was one of his earliest commissions.

Rob remembered producing a set of tunes using banjo style instrument sounds and there were a number of western tunes… “I remember doing some tunes with a small town America theme. I went out and bought a book on how to play blue grass banjo! I was dedicated back then! They must have been from the Gremlins game.”

Therefore the tunes from Final Synth Sample 1 were from the game which is currently unreleased and have been there all along. All the tunes were intended for the game, and the SFX could well have been too! (Tunes were later used in Shoot Out by Martech).

We learn thanks to Zzap64 issue 6 that it was being worked on just after Monty on the Run, as it is mentioned by Rob that he was working on a set of tunes with grass banjo effects and that it was his best work yet (see scans).

With the game itself, Roy tells us that it started as a side scroller game prototype (most likely side on platformer) for Adventure International UK. Nothing particularly innovative was attempted. Roy recalls that there was some confusion over the licence, and all that he can remember is being disappointed that they didn’t go on to completion. The initial prototype is all that is thought to have been created.

It might be possible that Adventure International UK decided not to do a non-adventure game, and rejected the idea – but its hard to confirm these days. However, an article with Adventure International in Your Computer magazine confirms that there was to be an arcade game due to the success of the adventure game. There was also news about there being a second adventure game too – so another GTW entry!

Sadly Roy feels that there are no copies of his demo still existing, as he jettisoned a great deal of stuff when he moved to the US in 1987. He may still find something, but it is looking unlikely after all this time. At the very least, Rob’s music is preserved and we now know a lot more about this once mysterious Gremlins game. We hope some day to present something more!