Games That Weren't^®

A neat little platformer this one, and something I fondly remember playing from the days of Zzap 64 and their famous megatapes.

Created by Zach Townsend (coder of Batman The Movie and Army Moves) after he had left Ocean, Dreamraider was produced by himself within his new Technodream team and started writing the game in the hope of later finding a publisher.

You control a creature similar to the frog in Nebulus, where you collect coins, and shoot various other creatures around a huge play-area, jump up trees and go down into deep caves etc. It featured good parallax, the graphics were average but the game played well overall.

In fact, when the demo was given away with Zzap 64 (issue 75), it came with a rather intriguing storyline about having to jump into a mad scientist’s dreams to prevent them developing a weapon that could destroy 90% of human life. The scenario, enemies and more would be generated from that scientist’s mind. See scans for more details about this.

After an interview with Zach in Commodore Zone back around 1999, it was found that only the one level was ever made (with a small bit of level two started), then the game was binned as Technodream fell apart. However, the Zzap demo page suggested that level two was virtually completed by Joe.

Zach went on to work on Stun Runner, followed by the doomed Race Drivin’. We may see glimpses of level two someday soon, though Zach informed GTW that he gave all his stuff to his brother, who may have long since sold or binned the disks by now. Tracking bits of level two is highly unlikely.

A nice little platformer, which may have done well…

I’m not a fan of puzzlers, and this game does little to convince me to play more of them.

A typical example of what was saturated onto the C64 scene at one point. A word game which i’m uncertain how it plays.

The graphics are quite weak, and need some work.

Otherwise, the game engine seems pretty much complete, just missing some vital graphics and tweaks.

Did the game ever get finished, and did it ever get better graphics?

A bit boring, maybe someone else will like it?…

A very big thanks to Mauricio Muñoz Lucero for highlighting this one for us. Dr Bazair ’92 is a game which has recently surfaced thanks to the author of Warhawk digging out his unreleased software whilst he develops the new Warhawk game on the DS.

Dr Bazair ’92 is sort of a sequel to both Michael’s other game Tidemarsh, but titlewise a sequel to his game which surfaced on the likes of Your Commodore’s covertape.

This is a great little preview of a game which for reasons unknown was stopped in 1992. It was coming on very well and is a neat sort of Robotron/Spore/Puzzler type of affair with nice graphics and presentation.

It is currently incomplete – as the level sets are not quite complete. There are two versions in the download, one a later version with better graphics and more levels (and easier too). Michael on his forum has said that if anyone wishes to finish things off they can and he has the level editor, some sfx and a highscore bit of code which can be used too.

It would be nice to see someone pick this up and tidy it up a bit, but its great that Michael has preserved things. Hopefully we may get chance to add the level editors and bits to the archive.

We hope to hear a bit more from Michael about the development in the future, but here it is … A great little game!!

More soon on this game we hope…

Two games essentially, but we’ve decided to create just the one entry for this one. Drax – Evilblood was produced mostly for fun it seems in its first instance, developed by Mark Gallagher with Ed Campbell on graphics.

Previously the game was not known about until Ramos gave GTW a heads up and pointed us in the direction of Mark’s website which had the downloads.

The game is fairly simple, and has you controlling a guy who has to kick and destroy various small creatures across a horizontally bi-directionally scrolling game. It reminds me a bit of Chameleon by Electric Dreams in some ways. The early version looks pretty dated, but its the remixed edition which really starts looking very nice indeed.

The remixed edition features most of the titles and intro credit screens of the first game, but contains a set of (we think) previously unheard tunes from Andrew (Drew) Rodger and a vastly improved set of graphics, including a lovely hi-res overlaid main character. Controls (like in the first iteration) are quite clunky and the game is not going to blow you away, but its great to see this hard work preserved. We believe that overall the remixed game is mostly complete, but still in a preview status (Hence why we are listing it as a preview). Ian Coog has kindly done some tidy ups and those two trained versions have been added to the zip.

Surely all of this work was meant for something commercially?…. It seems that this was a game being developed in the hope that a software house (Budget maybe?) would pick it up and release, but Mark confirms it wasn’t and was done purely for fun.

Well worth checking out!….

Created by Hans Ippisch who was interviewed in an old magazine. A question posed to him was about any unfinished projects which were gathering dust. His reply was that he had started on a game called “Dragon Slayer”, which only one level was ever almost finished.

The game was in fact to be a title released by Linel on the Amiga mainly, but seems a port for the C64 was also unofficially on the cards too. The game was mentioned in various magazines, and Games Machine had a Amiga shot, which we’ve included here.

In this level, you can fight against a giant dragon in high resolution graphics. Graphically impressive, you couldn’t really do much apart from stare at the animations for a few seconds.

Thanks to contributor Akkroid, we learn from a snippet in The Games Machine, that the title would be a sort of Psygnosis Barbarian type of game with very large characters wandering around rooms. We learn more of the story – which tells of a wicked dragon that terrorises a remote village – each year the villagers have to sacrifice a virgin to the beast in order to protect themselves. The only way to stop the dragon’s reign is for one particularly brave adventurer to locate the shattered segments of a medallion, access the dragon’s lair and wipe it out.

The game would feature hundreds of locations in villages, forest and the castle (which itself would have 300 rooms). Sadly it was never to be though!

This C64 version was spread as a demo by the programmer and is all what remains of this game. No extras or additional bits exist, unless Hans Ippisch can confirm otherwise?

Promising preview, never off the start line… What happened to the title from Linel which seemed to promise so much? Well, it transferred over briefly to Starbyte and was to be released under the title of Warriors of Darkness – a separate title with a new team which you can read more about at that link.

Thanks to screenshots from various magazines for an Amiga version of Night Hunter, it can be confirmed that this is in fact Night Hunter by Ubisoft. In the game, you control a nice Hi-res overlaid Dracula who must roam around his castle. Pressing down on the joystick turns you into a werewolf type character.

The first two previews have no sound, and the first preview doesn’t have very good scrolling. Preview two has much smoother scrolling, but little more than the first preview. There are a few glitches and bugs in both, but this can be put down to the stage reached by the previews. Dracula can actually walk in the air, and moonwalk too!

The third preview actually contains music by Jeroen, and allows you to go outside of the castle. This seems to be a later version of the game, and possibly this is how far it reached.

Jeroen Tel’s awesome music sits in the HVSC with its awesome samples and can also be downloaded from here. Apparently the tunes were done in a rush thanks to Ubisoft’s quick demands.

Originally it was not known why the game was cancelled, as Ubisoft continued to produce C64 games until 1992. Possibly the game was too hungry for sprites, as the main character is very well animated, two sprites high and has a overlay. Certainly by hacking into the game’s code, the player seems to have all his animations which he would have had in the full game. There were no other sprites made.

The game also saw release on the likes of the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad, Atari ST, Amiga and PC. So clearly there was some kind of issue with the C64’s development.

Well, thanks to a contributor – we learn that the coder was a chap called Guy Mille – who worked on Iron Lord previously for Ubisoft. Although the game was seemingly progressing well, Guy was under huge pressure regarding the graphics and fixing glitches, freeing additional scanlines. Some of the demands were a bit too much, and Guy called it a day with Ubisoft and moved on. Bruno also confirms that this was the case sadly.

As a result it seems – Ubisoft decided to cancel the C64 version. Did Guy release the remains of the game as a result of this? Nope – Guy had handed over the source code after leaving the project for pastures new.

There does exist a version which features enemies and sprites, which is what started to cause the glitches and issues that evented in cancellation of the game. It is now very unlikely that the last version of this game will ever see the light of day, but you never know. It is lucky that this version at least did make it!