Games That Weren't^®

Already creating the cult classic Wizball, Sensible Software tried to take their success even further with a new game, and with a new perspective altogether.

Sensible Software decided to take a trip into the world of 3D games with an ambitious Elite style space trading game. The game was to be in the same style as Elite, taking over various space stations to help create a new universe which was destroyed after a huge war.

Most notable about Sensible Software’s promising game, was the inclusion of fast filled 3D vector graphics. Something which had not really been seen on a C64 before at that point in time.

Sensible Software released a sneak preview rolling-demo of all the ships and descriptions to readers of Zzap!64 on their first ever cover tape, The Zzap Sampler. This was an advert for a big game which Sensible were hoping to create, with the hope that a publisher would see and want to sign it up.

The game’s name “The Day The Universe Died” was only a working title, and readers of Zzap were invited to help come up with a new name. What was the winning name?…. Dominion.

What happened?

It subsequently disappeared off the face of the earth, never to be heard of again. Sensible went onto other greatness and didn’t look back. So what happened?

Jon confirms to GTW that the game never progressed any further, which is what we all thought really. Jon explained that it was canned mainly due to other projects coming along. He believes that Chris Yates would have got this working on a stock C64, and that the machine was not a limitation. However, it may not have been anywhere near as fast as what we saw in the demo. Check out the Creator Speaks page for Jon’s own words.

A promising demo, which will ever remain a promising demo.

After seeing the awesome Xenon 2 on the Amiga/ST, Mike Dailly wondered to himself whether he could get a similiar parallax effect, with instead of a looped pattern as a parallax layer….
have a separate bitmap as the parallaxed layer.

After around 2 days worth of work, this very demo was born and took shape and form into the beginnings of a rather nice looking game.

Sadly it was never to be, and it never progressed past this tech stage. There were no plans as such, and I guess this would have taken off in its own direction as ideas flowed. Mike was drafted onto other projects, and this demo was never come back to.

It has remained on disk for years until now. Mike has kindly dug out the demo for GTW, but also SNASM and the source code for the effect for people to disect and use themselves.

So from a case open, to a case closed… But rather nice eye candy to look at just like with Starline.

Case closed…

An intriguing title by Mike Dailly, who is better known as the creator of Blood Money and Menace for Psygnosis… and then becomming one of the big names behind Lemmings.

This is a title which Mike recently released to the world via his web site, and contains all the source code. It is simply a freeze of ZEUS ASSEMBER, and you have to assemble it yourself to get it working. However, Jazzcat has arranged a compiled version for you to check out too.. But for those wishing to have a look at the source, check out the Readme file with the game from Mike himself.

It is an interesting looking title, from a very early working stage . Seems to be some kind of space Combat style game. Not playable as such, but the main character can be moved around.

There seems to be no concept or gameplan here, but just an initial coding idea which didn’t get very far until Mike found better projects to work on.

Recently we spoke to the game’s creator, Mike Dailly, who mentioned that there was a much more complete version that sadly seems to be lost. The idea was a simple 2 player blast, like Combat, where you fire a range of weapons at each other.
It was a game being worked on when Mike was only 17.

You can read more details about Mike’s work on the game in Creator Speaks.

This is sadly it, and is all that will ever be found. Hopefully Mike might have more to say about the game soon, so we’ll wait and see…

Case closed on this one…

Although eventually released by Audiogenic around 1992, this particular title wasn’t the same game which was first previewed in Zzap Issue #77. If you check the graphics, you’ll see there is a noticeable difference to the game which was released.

The game released was a slightly rehashed version of a cricket game by Audiogenic in the 80’s. So what happened to this other version? Did Audiogenic decide the leave the C64, scrap the current game and cut their losses by re-hashing the old game?

As you can see from the scans below, the version reviewed in Commodore Format (issue 12) and Your Commodore (issue 84) is considerably different.

We got in touch with Audiogenic years ago when they were still running, who suggested the original team were not making good enough progress. As a quick solution, the old game was recoded slightly and released at the end to make back some money. But was that really the case, considering it was reviewed by two magazines. Surely two magazines couldn’t have reviewed an unfinished game?

Our biggest lead was that some ex-Tynesoft guys were behind the original version – so, looking at the credits of previous Tynesoft games, we had a few names to investigate. Audiogenic did not recall any names, and did not have any of the code.

Recently thanks to Andrew Fisher, we eventually confirmed that the developer was none other than Kevin Franklin of Zybex fame. Graphics were done by David Peacock, who did graphics for other Tynesoft games. No music was thought to have been composed – Adam Gilmore having no involvement.

When we got in touch with David, he recalled that he went to Audiogenic after Tynesoft closed. He remembers tracing the bowling animation from a recorded cricket game on VHS using a sheet of paper taped over the screen.

Graphics were done on Deluxe Paint on the Amiga and then ported down. David believed he no longer had anything of his work, and didn’t realise the game had not actually been released.

When we finally got hold of Kevin – he had no idea what happened to the game and why it was never released. When he stopped working for Audiogenic around April 1991, the game was pretty much finished.

Overall it looked bleak – with Kevin and David confirming they had nothing of the game. At best, David suggested he may still have a few disks knocking about. Sure enough in 2014, David found some disks and passed them onto GTW64 for evaluation. All graphic disks were sadly PC formatted, so work continues on preserving them (which should be of interest across all formats).

However, there was one single C64 formatted disk which was labelled with “64 Cricket (Keep)”, which happened to be possibly the last remaining copy of the game! A frozen copy produced by Kevin to show David how the game was shaping up with his graphics in place. David didn’t even know that he had this, so it has been a surprise turn up!

Interestingly the main title screen has a different title of Graham Gooch All Star Cricket, which we’ve added as a sub title. Was the name later changed? It seems so… possibly this could be a build before Audiogenic decided to tie the game into the World Cup. So, missing still is a slightly later version with a different title, but the rest of the game seems to be in place.

We are not 100% sure how incomplete the title is, but it does look very close! No sound though, so we are keeping the entry as a preview. In the meantime, there is potential for a Spectrum, Amstrad set of graphics to also be saved in the near future.

The complete and lost title screen could also well be on a 5.25″ PC formatted disk that we have with the C64 graphics on, so watch this space! For now, check out another big finding!

Right, something a little new and previously unseen by the makers of Creatures, Apex Productions.

This is in fact a very very early preview of what eventually turned into “Creatures”. This was a test demo created to test some graphics and scrolling. Inspired heavily by the arcade game Wardener.

You can’t do too much at this stage, apart from move the character, jump and shoot fire – but with no ability to jump on platforms or much else. It is very early stages, with some nice graphics and parallax scrolling effects.

The demo was dug out by Jason Mackenzie many moons ago for GTW64, and an additional bonus was the inclusion of some unheard music by Steve Rowlands.

A nice glimpse at the early beginnings of what led to Creatures. Case closed!

Elite is undoubtfully one of the masterpieces of space exploration games in the history of computing, and there isn’t really an enthusiast or game player above the age of 18 who hasn’t heard of the game.

Nothing has really beaten the original 1985 classic, and very much so in the case of the C64 version. Cherry Software were aiming to creating something just as good, if not better, than the Braben/Bell classic.

Future World was to be a fantastic Elite style trading game, with filled vector graphics and presentation to knock the socks off the old classic.

The publicity information on the game was sure enough to get gamer’s excited, but unfortunatly as with a few of Cherry Soft’s game, this one was put under the kybosh, possibly due to poor sales of their previous releases.

A shame…. though fortunately a preview was released, and quite an impressive one at that. Apart from the snazzed up trading screens and fairly impressive space scenes (Which are currently empty from any 3D ships), actual space fighting occurs over a Combat style arena, with two ships battling it out. A nice idea, though possibly a 3D battle encounter would have been better.

So, all the trimmings and current building blocks of a great space trading game, but no full game. Just how far the developers got with this game is something GTW is hoping to find out. It is quite likely that the game progressed further after its preview was launched. Credits are available to us, so now research can be made. Rumour has it that Cherry Soft had some connection to F4CG, can anyone confirm or deny this?

A fantastic little preview, an idea lost in space…

Future shock is a very early preview, containing a few detailed organic landscapes and nothing much else. The ship can move through objects and there are no other creatures to kill or find.

The game was actually to be a conversion of a game of the same name from the Amiga platform (Thanks Gaz Spence!) , and which was given away with Amiga Fun magazine on one of their covermounts. The game was a sort of Cybernoid clone.

Looking at the entry on Lemon Amiga, you can clearly see how close the C64 version was looking – though the C64 version still had a lot more work required.

The preview seems to have a strange ship, which might not be the intended sprites – as looking within the sprites for the preview, there is another ship sprite which looks more like the one used in on the Amiga version. There is no dinosaur head though!

Be warned, but the preview is pretty glitchy and can crash – but there are a few screens to see.

Now the question is whether the game was by the same development team, and if it was being developed at the same time. Maybe the game was being developed for both platforms with the intention of selling to C64 Fun as the C64 edition?

A lot more research needed, but a lot closer to solving this mystery! Does anything more exist? Why was it cancelled?