Games That Weren't^®

In the same era as the lost release of Pyramid of Time, Firebird were also to release another Activision game on their Silverbird label…

Zzap first mentioned news of the game in issue 26… “Hot on the heels of the latest Activision re-releases come four more golden oldies – Futureball, Pyramids of Time, Pitfall and BreakStreat.

The former is an odd sort of game, where the player takes controll of a ball and has to escape from a network of pipes before water floods the whole system. Strange but true, and you only have to wait a month to find out more!”

The game according to Richard Hewison was a proposed followup to Ballblazer, but although an Activision title… it doesn’t seem to have even been released by themselves.

Although rumoured to be a Ballblazer sequel, GTW64 learns that it was in fact nothing to do with the game. It was in fact a re-imagining of an earlier Activision game for the Colecovision called Steamroller – which itself didn’t get released until 2000. This was confirmed by the game’s developer, Glyn Anderson – who designed and developed the game with Peter Kaminski, with Russell Lieblich on SFX/Music.

The general idea of the game was translated into a race in space, using a space station/arena to tie levels together and show progress through the game. After this refresher design was proposed, it was given the green light to go into production. Although the game was completed, Activision suddenly decided not to release it – for reasons sadly unknown at present.

So that explains the original release and we know also that the game was completed and that Firebird were sent a complete version. So why did Firebird never release it?

It is believed that there were mastering problems with the three unreleased Activision titles and getting them onto tape. Ironically it was only the three unreleased games that were a struggle to master, so it could be related to the format they were sent over as from the US.

As for finding the game – the hunt begins in full now that we have some credits. Unfortunately it is looking bleak already, as both Glyn and Peter no longer have a copy of the game – though they are asking around people they know to see if anyone else has a copy. Additionally, Russell Lieblich sadly passed away some years ago and may have been the best hope of recovering the game.

We hold out hope though that some day this may surface – it sounds like a unique and fun game which could be a missing gem in the Activision catalogue. Will we ever find out?

A very quick entry which was highlighted by Romppainen.

Fusion was an average shooter produced by Bullfrog for Electronic Arts on the Amiga back in 1988. Nothing unusual there, but Romppainen highlights that the game was listed as being released on the C64 (or soon at least) via Finnish “Commodore-lehti” magazine.

It could well be a bit of vapourware, but one we need to confirm anyway due to the press mention of the C64 format.

Can you help with this one?

An educational game from Fisher Price this time, and one of a few titles which never got shipped by Roger Pedersen. We aren’t sure yet if he had any development time on the C64 version, or the Apple. Most of the time Roger talked of how easy it would be to convert from MSDos to 64 and Apple.

Thanks to contributor Arcachnar, we learn from a magazine snippet for the PC edition that the game would have you flying a cartoon plane that had to catch stars, balloons, snowflakes and kites – whilst transporting Fisher-Price “Little People” by air. There would be three skill levels to accommodate inexperienced and advanced players. It seems the PC edition may well have been released!

We hope to get in touch with Roger Pedersen and find out more about what happened to these games. The email address we had for him has sadly expired, and it may be a bit tricky now to get in touch with him. Does anything exist of this game now? Or is it another educational game to join the graveyard with Razzmatazz?

Thanks again to Arcachnar, we learn that the game was offered in a “Bargain Basement” advert for the C64 – so did the game manage to sneak out in limited numbers? In an interview with Roger Pedersen, he reveals that the C64 version apparently never shipped – so was that indeed the case?

More soon we hope…

Fruit Fight is an interesting entry which was to be an unofficial arcade conversion of Dingo (Ultimate Arcade)

The game was quite a good copy according to Stephen Kellett (the game’s coder). The game was written for Gannon Designs who also did Pacland and The Tube on the C64. Sadly Martin Gannon got Motor Nuerone Disease and passed away. According to Stephen, Martin was a larger than life guy with an enormous ego but had funny ideas about how you do business. He thought that you could swear to other business people in meetings and that that was acceptable. As a result he got rubbish deals from people for their conversions.

Martin had a deal for Fruit Fight which was rubbish, but it would have been profitable (just) compared to what it had cost to write. Rather than cover his costs, Martin told the people behind the deal to stick it even though he had nowhere else to sell it. Had Martin agreed, he may well have kept Gannon Designs running a few months longer in 1988.

When the liquidators came in, they took everything and held everything of Fruit Fight. For fun, Stephen wrote an IBM PC AT version during his lunch hour in his next job and at home in the evenings he wrote Fruit Fight for the Atari ST.

We may not be able to release anything of Fruit Fight, and Stephen certainly cannot allow us to. It will be down to us finding another source of the game, which we hope might be possible. Who knows!

But this sounds like an awesome conversion we simply must find!

Can we find it?…

A Rambo rip off which was found out about thanks to Jax, who started off at Zeppelin games as a young developer.

CPCGames reviews (http://www.cpcgamereviews.com) describes the game as follows:

"A squad of troops has been sent to infiltrate enemy bases. Each troop member takes it in turn to enter and explore each base, firing bullets from his automatic MK gun, and lobbing grenades at turrets, guns and soldiers in trenches. While you’re doing all of this, your real aim is to find a bag containing sensitive documents which has been carelessly placed somewhere in the base, and then go to the laboratory to complete the level. Extra grenades and upgrades to your gun are readily available, and there is a bottle of elixir which restores your strength. The graphics are fairly good, although the sound effects could be better, and despite the game being slightly slow, it’s still nice to play. "

Jax was assigned to this game, but it didn’t get very far when Jax found a few things about Zeppelin:

"I was slated to do it, but they’d just started up and only wanted to pay me as a YTS employee… Writing games back then was fun, but you still need to make a living, and 40 quid a week just wouldn’t cut it so I pissed off to college and Uni instead."

But work was started, and the game got to a movable stage at the very least as Jax explains:

"I did get started, but not much. Just built the basic split-screen scrolling map and a sprite multiplexer, separated off bands for score, etc. We had some test gfx, but it really wasn’t even the start of a game. Nothing survived – like I say, it wasn’t anything worth keeping. "

It is assumed that the graphic artist assigned to the C64 version could well still have some remains of the game, and maybe Jax’s work. It’s a long shot, but otherwise this game could be lost in the depths of time. We are assuming that the graphics were done by Michael Owens, though need confirmation of this. Jax did not specify, but its possible that it was too early in the game’s life to have a graphic artist assigned. We finally assume that Adam Gilmore would have done the music, as he did for pretty much all of Zeppelin’s C64 games in the beginning.

It seems strange that when Jax left, no one picked up this conversion – which is a shame. This could have been a great little budget game. Will we learn any more?

A potentially great game lost?…

Another SEUCK title, from a different face this time called Ian Brown. Related to this game is Marc Walters who
did the great Cronic The Badger game which resides in GTW.

Frontier promised some of the best graphics and gameplay ever seen created in SEUCK, and looks similiar to Delta/Armalyte at 90 degrees.

Marc bought a licence to distribute it back in the 80’s from the creator, but never sadly got to do anything with it. So the game remained in Marc’s disk collection for the rest of time.

Sadly Marc has lost contact with the author, but the game very likely still exists in Marc’s collection, and hopefully he will be dig out the game soon for everyone to see.

Ian Brown got in touch with GTW64 in 2012 to put his hand up to being the designer of the game and had the following to say:

“It would be awesome to have a copy of this game, as I’ve long since lost it. It would be great to get in touch with Marc again, too.

As far as what I can remember… it is indeed a vertical scrolling shoot-em up in the vein of delta/armalyte. Two can play simultaneously, both ships handle differently and have different weapon styles. I do remember spending a lot of time on the visuals.

I’m sure I will remember more if hopefully Marc has a copy safe. Am crossing my fingers!”

Is this really a SEUCK game to die for?… We shall see…. Marc, if you are out there – please help us dig out this game!

A very vague entry this time, and not to be confused with the Spectrum game of the same name by Design Design (1986).

A brief mention of this game was given in the end sequence of Freddie Hardest – Manhatten (Guardian Angel). But the game was never seen or heard of. This was to be the next game of the developers

We’re not entirely sure what this game would have consisted of, but we are guessing that Dinamic went under just before the game could be finished or released.

However, developers of the C64 version were known as Iron Byte, who were a Uruguayan group. They originally started as a hardware company called HiLow Computers, and then transformed into a software development team called Iron Byte.

Thanks to info from contributor Nemo, we lean from an interview at Micromania Segunda Epoca (Spanish) issue 35 (April 1991) that their core team consisted of Juan Gaspar, Juan Arias, Carlos Galucci, Fernando Veira, Jorge Gil, Roberto Eimer. They occasionally collaborated with the Arias Brothers, Ricardo and Ramiro.

Maybe someone from the team will get in touch, or we can find them and find out more about what this sequel would have consisted of.