Games That Weren't^®

Fortress America was part of the Wargamers series by PSS and was advertised in their catalogues, but the C64 version has never surfaced by the looks of things and no other version seems to have either.

The game was rumoured to be your typical RPG and pretty much followed the same routine as previous PSS games.

We’d like to try and find the C64 version, even if it was released and get it preserved. However, we have no current leads so this will be a tough challenge.

Can you help us?

Now then … this is interesting. Check out HVSC, and under Charles Deenen you will find a very interesting music entry in the shape of Formula 1 Simulator, and a very awesome rendition of the F1 theme tune too :-)

However, track down the music demo which the music was ripped from (and can be found here to download), and you’ll note the Virgin credit. So, we can confirm that there was a game behind this tune (I bet we can find hundreds more GTW titles in HVSC if we searched hard enough). It was thanks to CSDB that this came up and a discussion on the tune.

Interestingly, in GTW already there is a Car Game which Simon Nicol is credited to (No download) which is linked to Martech and also Virgin games. Charles also confirmed that his F1 tune was for Virgin Games back in the late 80’s upon request. (Charles has done music for a previous Simon Nicol game – Back To The Future 3 – probably just a co-incidence?).

Just to check – we are now trying to find Simon again to ask him some more and see if there is any link at all with this Formula 1 game and his car game.

Just as an aside, another question came up with the Martech link and if Simon Nicol was behind the C64 conversion of Nigel Mansell. However it is widely known to have been underway by Andromedia (Just who within Andromedia, I don’t know) – so it could well be likely that Simon was just working on another title for Martech.

Martin/Stadium 64 found a very interesting advert for what must be the game – advertised in a US based catalogue. Here it is called “Formula 1 Simulator 2”, suggesting that it was a budget sequel to the original Mastertronic classic. It is very likely that this is the same game that Charles Deenen composed for.

It is thought that Virgin may not have got the F1 licence, which could have been already nabbed by Electronic Arts, or they deemed that there were too many F1 games at the time. Still, its an interesting one, and could be very hard finding out more about it. But check out the very cool music at least for now!

Kele Line games were a Danish games company, who now are probably most famous for their excellent title, The Vikings. They only released two other games, Tiger Mission and Zyrons Escape, before disappearing into the forgotten mists of C64 nostalgia.

However, they did have another four games slated for release, one of which was Force of the Vulcan. Nothing is known about this game other than its brief mention in issue 2 of Computer Action. It was due to be released in late 1987, the same year as The Vikings and Tiger Mission, but the company went bankrupt towards the end of the year.

Whether this game was due to be a licensed Star Trek game is unknown, though if that was the case then it is likely that there would be more information about the game available. As it is we can presume it would be a sci-fi game, as the reference to Vulcan would suggest (unless it’s a game about vulcanised rubber).

Well, Rune Vendler confirms that the game was to be a sideways scrolling beat-em-up, which was actually later changed and released as Thunder Force on the Rack It/Hewson label. The original game was to be based loosely on the Yoko Tsuno comic book “The Forge of Vulcan”, but was not an official licence.

So we now have some credits, and the question remains to whether anything of the original game still exists?

A vague title in the dungeons of GTW.

Unfortunately there is not currently much information on this game, but there was only the rumor of Rob Hubbard composing the music for this game. This now has been confirmed thanks to Jan Harries who had an old email from Rob who confirmed that he did indeed do the music.

Rumor has it that this game was to be a clone of the arcade game “Food Fight”, though this needs to be clarified. John Knox according to Richard Hewison was the guy behind the game but we know little more right now.

From Richard’s site the game apparently contained big fruit according to other members of Telecomsoft at the time.

Status of the game is currently unknown, but we believe a fair old chunk of the game was produced. And now very importantly there is some Rob Hubbard music to try and find too!

In 2015 – Chris Abbott confirmed to GTW64 that the recently recovered “Cheers Rob” HVSC added tune was in fact meant for Food Feud – possibly the in game tune. It is a major finding and at last a piece of the jigsaw found!

Can the game now be found??

Flyspy is a great little budget title from Mastertronic which was well received. You basically control a helicopter inside a super computer and have to destroy it with a nuclear bomb. It was a nice flick screen arcade adventure game. A nice review can be found on Retro Gamer

The game was written by Richard Aplin, and was his first project for Mastertronic. However, it wasn’t his time yet on the C64 and the conversion to the C64 was being handled by someone else.

Unfortunately things didn’t go very well with the conversion, and Mastertronic decided to scrap the conversion. No other version was started and as a result that was it.

We’re not too sure yet how far things got, the reason why it stalled and who was behind it (It might have been Binary Design, but we cannot be sure). Its very early days yet for this one. Sadly Richard Aplin was not sure who was doing the C64 version but if he recalls he will let GTW know.

Do you know any more about this conversion?…

After a fairly successful introduction, Flimbo was to be given another roll in his very own sequel called “Flimbo’s Quest 2”. The first mention of the sequel was actually in the end sequence of the first game.

This was to be a five level game with massive maps including beautiful parallax scrolling, graphics, animation and game play, improving much further over the original. The parallax scrolling was to be ditched, so the game could cope with sloped platforms. It was more of the same, but to be far more improved compared to the original game.

The Dutch developers of the sequel as well as the original, Laurens van de Donk and Arthur van Jole were still waiting to be paid by System 3 for the first game. Originally according to speculation, it was rumoured they both decided to halt work on the sequel after non-payment of the first game, and so Flimbo 2 was shelved. Actually, Arthur confirms its close, but in fact they were only offered about £1500 to do the game, and so it was cancelled.

Arther did level graphics only, but sadly these have been long lost. Only Laurens or someone else *might* have it tucked away somewhere… or something at least… but its not all lost…

Music was created and completed by none other than Reyn Ouwehand, and it is recently thanks to the guys at High Voltage Sid Collection in Christmas 2009 that we have got chance to listen to the tunes (See link at top now). Sadly there was no preview present with the tunes :-(

Thanks to iAN CooG for also supplying GTW with the correct SID file for the game (Which just has the one tune, compared to the initial release which incorrectly had more tunes). The original music demos were added in December 2015

Currently there sits a unfinished game in a playable stage, which GTW may possibly get some screenshots of and hopefully some exciting news one day… who knows. Sadly its not been good so far, Checks have been made to find the disks with the remains of the game, but sadly nothing has been found yet. Will anyone find anything?… We honestly don’t know… This could sadly be
lost forever… :(

Flimbo unfortunately lost this quest…