Games That Weren't^®

A early preview of what looks like a Moon Patrol clone, with no obstacles or enemies as of yet.

Apart from a nice title screen, the game is quite lacking at the moment, with a simple car which moves left and right.

Plans for the game are unknown, or at what stage it reached. M Hartemink will hopefully help us with this game once he is tracked down.

A little preview, but not much else yet…

A very oddly named title which was to be released by the brother of RR Software head Rowan Veale.

The game was created by Lyndon Veale and was a simple static shooter which was written over the top of Slap and Tickle (with many old sprites still present).

It never appeared, so its early days for this one. A demo did actually appear on Commodore Cracker, and we can now present this and its two screens thanks to Vinny Mainolfi for passing on his disk. Sadly there isn’t much to see, but its a glimpse of what Lyndon was doing.

We believe that Lyndon was younger than Rowan and just wanted to be involved too with what his older brother was doing. We guess that as they got older, they decided to move on and do other things.

Do you know any more?

Digital is another puzzle game, and one which I haven’t had chance to try and figure out. If anyone can shed light on what the game is about, please let me know :)

It is a Polish game by Nostalgia productions, and it doesn’t seem to have got past this preview we are offering. This seems to be a fairly advanced preview, featuring pretty much complete titles and graphics throughout. The full game was to feature:

* More graphics
* Exclusive musics
* Working match game and level game mode (Match means 2 games between players, level game means player must win some levels to win the whole game)
* And many more

A bit more research required to find out if this game did get further or was even completed. We hope so anyway!

More soon on this one…

A preview of an up and coming game by Italian giants Simulmondo in 1992. Not much is known about the game, apart from the main character was based from an old Italian comic, called Diabolik. The character was a thief and an assassin, the “Armakuni’s” dress is his usual look for when he’s in action. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Diabolik

The preview itself just consists of a series of intro screens, followed by release details for other machines. So the game was due for the PC and Amiga too and actually got released. The game was actually released on the Amiga in a large series of games, all following the same style. http://hol.abime.net/343

The game basically was a kind of Metal Warrior/Saboteur style of game, and it seems that the C64 would have been host to a series of games. However it is likely that Simulmondo abandoned the C64 in favour of the 16-bit platforms, and hence this game was lost. Diabolik and its games appeared in around 1993 time.

More information is required on this game, including who was working on it. Quite possibly the same people who did Dylan Dog (Certainly the style was not too far off!) In 2010, Roberto Nicoletti spoke with Ivan Venturi and Nicola Ferioli and had the following to say:

“I’ve also talked about Diabolik to Ivan Venturi and Nicola Ferioli and at first time they did not remembered at all they have worked on it. Then I showed to Ivan the screenshot of the preview and he starts to remember a bit. Nicola Ferioli did not remember Diabolik also, but when at home he found through some old diskette the development floppy, with sources included.

I guess the case could be closed: they worked on it a couple of afternoon about 20 years ago but were too busy with other project to keep tracks in their memory. “

So within the archive we now have a disk copy of the intro containing some source code, but this is just for the intro sequence and no game. It seems the C64 intro was started, but no game was ever created with just an Amiga/PC version being produced in 1993.

Gaz Spence found that the trailer/demo was actually released by Simulmondo themselves as a bonus extra in Basket Play-Off. In the demo, it just says “Coming soon on your Amiga, PC VGA 256 colors”.  So it seems that that point a C64 development was off the cards. Perhaps it was never on the cards at all, and the intro demo that leaked was just produced as an advert for the game on other platforms.

Sadly it looks like a case closed on this one.

Now I can remember when this game first came about 10 years ago. After trying to locate my 10 year old site pages on Super Fighter for another entry, I discovered a news item I wrote on Lasse’s 8 directional scrolling detective game.

Things were progressing very well, with a small demo showing a cool character from a top down/slanted viewpoint who could move and scroll the screen in all 8 directions. Graphics were a bit sparse for the test demo, but gave enough of an indication of what was coming.

Unfortunately interest was lost in the project, and Lasse called it a day to concentrate on Metal Warrior 3 and 4. The code may well have been re-used in BOFH – Servers Under Siege, which Lasse did a year or so later.

A huge shame that this never progressed much further, as this could have been quite an interesting take on a detective game in this shape and form. This is likely to be all that ever existed of the game, so check it out if you haven’t already!