Games That Weren't^®

Now for something a little different for GTW, as this special entry is more a Intro That Weren’t than a Game That Wasn’t.

As you well know, the Rowlands were two famous C64 developers, creating the fab Creatures series and then going out with a bang with their 100% rated Mayhem In Monsterland game.

Before these games, Steve and John Rowlands had success with other titles such as Retrograde, and Cyberdyne Warrior. The latter hit some serious distribution problems, and pretty much it came out at the same time as Retrograde (The sequel) as a result.

Anyhow, the game DID come out – however, a little chunk of the game which didn’t quite make the final mastering, the introduction sequence and also a loading screen too. Why neither made it, we don’t yet know. The sequence and artwork has been sitting on a disk for years, until permission was granted from the Rowlands for the work to be added onto GTW.

It is a short but sweet introduction, featuring some nice graphics and animation. The main ship is awesome, and an indication of what was to come from the talents of Apex in those days. Your ship flies through space, slowing to land on the planet. It then lands deep underground, where the ship then rests. The Cyberdyne Warrior protagonist jumps out, and ends by jumping down into the underground while avoiding guarding droids.

There is no sound in the introduction, though maybe Steve has composed a piece which sits in HVSC that was mean’t for this?

Additionally in 2008, Jason (Kenz) Mackenzie has kindly dug out the unused loading screen too for the game, and this can be found in with the download!… Now we just need someone to patch everything together and release a 100% version!

We will try and find out why this never got mastered with the final game – we suspect it was a space issue or due to the issues with getting it published.

Curly Squirrel is a promising looking GTW entry which puts you in the control of a two sprite red squirrel in a single screen adventure. The aim of the game is a little unclear, mainly because the preview is in such an early phase.

However, interestingly the game development was started way back in around 1991 by Roland Hermans and Joachim Wijnhoven. This is the running preview which you can check out. This seemed to have got leaked back in 2005, and it came to light that the project was still being worked on, but with new graphics by Johan Janssen (Who released a picture from the game that he did for Primary Star 2005).

Recently we have been given all of the remains we know exist of Curly Squirrel thanks to Marco Das for the submission. In the submission both Joachim and Johan spoke about the project.

Joachim had the following to say:

"We wanted to sell the game under our game label Visual Delight to CP Verlag (Germany) we had an idea for the bonus levels in the game just like Time Runner this with our squirrel and with different levels like the forest meanies. etc.

i still have an unused sid lying from this level, but maybe i can still use it somwhere."

Johan also had the following to say regarding the disk remains:

“Graphics on the d64 are all from JSL (Johan) and the graphics in the playable preview are from Joachim.

D64 consists of:
– loading pic
– title pic
– background pic named curly trees
– 5 intro pics should be animated
– a few sprites for the intro
– bitmap sprites for converting to sprites a bear and a tortoise
– a playable preview from the nineties with gfx from Joachim”

It seems that the project fell by the wayside for reasons still currently unknown back in 1991. The project was much later picked up by Johan, who was to redo all the graphics we believe. Music was stll to be completed by Joachim (and hopefully we should be seeing/hearing the SID tunes very soon).

More details soon, but its believed that the coder decided to leave the project and a new developer was seeked to continue the project and complete it. Unfortunately no programmer could be found, and the plans to have a two screen level based game was axed. And now all the remains have been submitted to GTW, including many new pieces of artwork by Johan which have not been seen before. You can find everything on the download disk, including an executable preview. The screenshots can be viewed in the shots section if you do not want to dig out a graphic viewer (We just ran them through Congo to see them).

I’m sure the full picture of this game will be cleared up soon, but for now check it out!…

Sadly never quite to be…

Another game in the archives. Thanks to Richard Bayliss, we learn that the game preview appeared on Commodore Scene issue 13 cover disk and was made in 1995 by Violent Flower Software. All that seems to remain of it is the preview we have here.

The game is pretty simple – you have to select tiles and place them onto the game grid, ensuring that all tiles are positioned in the correct place, but when you insert a tile – two colours must match the previous tile, which you try to connect in that particular position. However, you are against time and you also cannot undo a move.

The game features some fair graphics, good music and nice titles, but nothing much else.

The game never surfaced on the scene as a complete game, nor was it sold through any companies. Its now down to finding the crew of this game to find out more.

Do you know any more about this game?

Another puzzler, no instructions again… but looks as if you have to replicate a image on the right part of the screen. Graphically quite nice, the game is one of many puzzle games which saturated the C64 market.

This one however didn’t make it too far, and was scrapped for unknown reasons. Credits have now been established thanks to Gamebase64 and Anonymous Contributor, so we hope to learn more soon.

More information needed on this game…