Games That Weren't^®

This neat little Uridium clone was brought to my attention by Hein Holt, which has been around for a number of years.

This game is done by none other than Falco Paul, and is one of his earlier programming efforts, and a good one at that.

This seems to be a preview, although many elements of the game are there. There are no sound effects in the game itself.
It was about 70% complete before it was cancelled. The game was actually sent to an American company (whose name is not remembered at the moment), but in the end things never materialised.

The game was sadly cancelled due to the 20CC based work taking too much time, and the lack of a dedicated artist to work on the game’s graphics.

The game was to improve upon the Uridium game play and feature a whole host of cool new features. Sadly it was never to be.

This is about as good as it gets with regards to finding more of the game. Falco’s source code was all but lost many years ago. So this is another case closed. Check out Falco’s own words about his game in "Creator Speaks".

A great little Uridium clone which sadly never quite made it…

Case closed …

A curious and complex puzzler which involves unscrambling various famous structures of world famous works of art created by Dr Devious. In the game, you control JJ (JoJo) Maverick, the hero who must do the unscrambling.

The game featured some smart graphics by Bob Stevenson, which sadly many would never get to see as intended. Commodore Format also confirmed that Martin Walker was playing a part in the game too, handling all the various audio duties.

Originally it was rumoured that John Twiddy or Doug Hare were behind the game as developer, but both confirmed otherwise. Doug Hare confirmed it none other than Myth/Salamander creator Peter Baron who was coder of the C64 and Amiga/ST versions.

Peter started out on the C64 version, mainly because he had not quite picked up coding on the Amiga/ST at that point. When Peter finally got there, he did a source conversion in a day and had the game playable, even having Bob’s graphics ported from the C64!

The Amiga/ST editions had taken priority during the C64’s development, and by the time they were complete, the C64 version was 2 months behind. Imageworks spoke to Peter and Bob, and told them to drop the C64 conversion as they felt the C64 was dying out at that point. It had nothing to do with the collapse of Imageworks which came not too long afterwards.

Peter was tracked down in 2005, and very kindly gave a detailed account of the game which you can read  in Creator Speaks. Peter tells us that the game was born in a pub whilst drinking with Bob, where they came up with a main character who had mystical powers, and which could walk up walls and on the ceiling.

Although the game was produced very fast and at a good flow, the game was way too complex to play because of cramming too many controllable features into a joystick with one button. Levels had to be simplified down to add a good learning curve, but it was proving difficult. Most of the complex ideas were reluctantly dropped to try and save the C64 version. Even the easy levels were not quite so easy!

The game production lasted about 9 months in total on the C64 before the decision to focus on the other platforms took place.

Martin Walker was to do dynamic music that reacted to the game and the player’s actions. This was a very complicated idea which apparently caused Martin various problems (on the Amiga/ST versions at least). GTW spoke with Martin Walker and he confirmed that he would have been doing the C64 music, had the game been completed. Because he did music at the last minute for games, nothing for the C64 version was sadly ever started.

In 2006, Pete traced all of his C64 disks and passed on remaining code to GTW. In 2006, we presented the first ever release of the C64 conversion, an approximately 80% complete edition in total, so classified as a “preview”.

Thanks to Glenn Rune Gallefoss and Pete Baron, the game was carefully pieced together from its sources to get the Bonus levels working, which were corrupted in the original executable we were given. It was Glenn and Pete therefore who have made it possible to see Devious in its most finished state possible.

The guys originally found a manner of other goodies hidden away in the sources, including a hidden 4 player mode (though not at the same time), and some other various bits and pieces. Not all the pieces could however be put into the game.

Eventually it was decided by Pete to go with the original controls in the new source code, before Mirrorsoft changed everything. This is therefore most complete version of Devious in accordance Pete’s guidance during compiling of a final version. The sources could well be added to the site at a later date, pending if Pete gives permission for this as an additional interest point.

This is a great puzzler which has some really nice artwork by Bob. The extra bonus is that Pete has supplied 6 previews of the game in various early stages. You can find these in the original ported disk images in the download below.

Check out a piece of C64 history for yourself and see just what we missed out on back in the day.

Case closed!

A game which readers of Commodore Format will no doubt remember only too well. The C64 was dying, the games were drying up and EBES (Electric Boys Entertainment Software) were attempting to keep it all going. A big spread was put in a late issue of Commodore Format, dedicated to the launch of EBES, where the big poster release promised was Defensive.

The game was pretty much a clone of Defender with knobs on – with some impressive parallax scrolling (similar to Sanxion in some respects), a neat ship and cool end of level guardians. A preview managed to sneak out many moons ago, which consists of 3 levels, with no attack waves, just a few crafts and end baddies. There is also no sound present.

The preview though was much older than you might think, and was developed in the mid-late 1980s. The original developers were Ian and Martin (Known more as ‘God and Hake’) and were good friends of Russ. They had ditched the game before moving onto fully fledged commercial projects such as ‘Galdregons Domain’ and ‘Volfield’. When EBES became a company back in 1994, EBES’ Russ Michaels dug it out and planned to enhance the game with his team of programmers.

However, it was planned to be a release that required a CMD RAMLINK, allowing instant loading, video cutscenes and large animated sequences. The graphics were to be more colourful and defined, more animation and ultra smooth scrolling. These were the features mentioned in Commodore Format at least. It is likely that a cutdown version would have been done for those without a RAMLINK.

The support for the C64 was decaying badly, and no-one was buying the hardware that Russ was importing. Things also became difficult at EBES, with most of the development team leaving Russ by himself.

Russ took the game on briefly, messed around briefly, but that was it. As Commodore World was being imported into in the UK by EBES as part of its many ventures (this to save the magazine readership in the UK), Russ asked readers to let him know if they wanted to support Defensive. No response was given at all, so the game was axed for good.

Just how impressive the title could have been is a mystery. Certainly from what remains, there was much promise in the title, but quite simply people had moved on.

Russ informs us that he had approached Jon Woods, creator of Colony, with the suggestion of changing the name of Colony to ‘Defensive’ and selling it through EBES. However, this never really materialised and that title never saw release either.

He later informed us in March 2022 that additional work was done on the game, which progressed past the demo shown in Commodore Format. He is pretty usre music and alien attack waves were added. Remains of this will be on a set of disks that were sold on when EBES went bankrupt. Unfortunately attempts to arrange for the disks to be preserved have hit a few brick walls over the years.

We hope to soon get more information about the original development from God and Hake themselves. Some notes from Charles Deenen signifies that Defensive was to have music composed by Jeroen Tel for the Thalamus release.

In an interesting twist – when the late Jukka Tapanimäki’s disks were digitally preserved, it was found that one of the disks included music demos by Maniacs of Noise. One of the demos featured music for Defensive. These were tunes that eventually ended up being used in Players’ Tomcat game (also by God and Hake). It seems Martin Godbeer and Ian Denny must have ordered the tunes for Defensive originally, but when the game fell through – they just re-used the tunes in Tomcat.

The music demo credited Thalamus as being the publisher. So the question now remains as to what happened. Did Thalamus reject the game? Or did Ian and Martin simply lose interest in the title?

A game in similiar mould to Scumball/IBall 2, with a similiar look and feel. This was developed in 1990, but was soon cancelled due to the developers feeling that this game could never do well, due to the dying C64 community. However, the C64 did go on for another 3 years until it finally died out.

The game after cancellation was left in a disk box and forgotten about, until the developers came across the disks once more and decided to see what was on the disks, uncovering their lost game which they had forgotten about. Apparently the coder pretty much keeps everything, so there was no chance of this game ever becoming lost :)

Defector is in very early stages, but is playable enough for you to move the main character (somewhat reminisent of the main character from One Man and His Droid) around a fairly sized map. Graphically its quite spectrumy, but clearly defined and animated well enough. This could have been a sufficient budget release had it been completed. There is no sound in the game, which no doubt is down to the early stage of development.

It’s uncertain who this game would have been pitched to, though it would have been pitched to all the companies for certain. It is one of those games which asks the question “What if?”…

At least what remains has been saved, and can finally be enjoyed by others and appreciated.

Case closed…

A pretty big turn up for the books when Ramos gave GTW the heads up about this game. Mark Gallagher is already known to GTW thanks to his other game Shylock which was uncovered, but on a set of pages he also did a bit of digging around some old C64 disks and uncovered one of his only commercial ventures for the C64 – Deathstalker.

Deathstalker was originally thought to be a Spectrum/Amstrad only game, which was a bit of a surprise to myself – as pretty much all of Codemaster’s games were cross converted… however it seems now we are getting a trend, what with this, Mission Jupiter, Twin Turbo V8 all coming forward.

The original Amstrad game was developed by Tony Warriner and released in 1989, it was an average affair – receiving fairly poor ratings, which seemed pretty harsh. The game itself is a sort of Karnov/Switchblade looking game, but with slightly unclear graphics and gameplay. It did however feature a neat David Whittaker tune!

After doing a bit of C64 work, Mark applied for the job of converting the game to the C64 when an advert was put out for converting the title. He got the job when very young and went to visit the Spectrum’s developer Tony Warriner. He was given all of the game code and graphics to take apart and create a C64 conversion. Unfortunately due to a bit of coding inexperience, Mark ran out of memory and found that he had to ditch doing the conversion for Codemasters. More details can be found in Creator Speaks!

Mark had actually got quite far, but because of the error – development stopped. It wasn’t until recently after by chance coming across some disks that worked. Mark recovered the game and ported it over to PC for people to download. And so here it is!

The demo is very early and does not feature proper sprites, just blocks – but you can walk around the landscapes, and there is a bit of minimal interaction. Music is borrowed from Matt Gray. The graphics as you can see are a straight port from the Spectrum, and are very unclear in the grey tone. Also beware that picking up some objects will crash the game!

Also now added is a quick tidied up version from Ian Coog which means you can pick up objects without the game crashing!

We are hoping that there may be a bit more of the game to recover, maybe one with the sprites in place and maybe even a long lost David Whittaker tune!…. Possibly the version that ran out of memory is a lot more complete, but its early days yet! Maybe we may see more of this yet?…

Watch this space, but grab yet another long lost Codies game!….

Darius + was advertised in various magazines, and was advertised by The Edge for all machines, including the Commodore 64.

The game is a conversion of a popular arcade by Taito, and eventually did surface on the Amiga, Spectrum (http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0001254) and ST machines, but sadly the conversions were not too great. The C64 version never surfaced at all.

Just how far the C64 conversion got was unknown until graphic artist Tahir Rashid got in touch:

“I did some test work on it, as I did the original ST and Amiga versions.

The only thing that was done on it was the sprites and the first level, the game was canned after 4 weeks into development due the the coder leaving after a row over payments.

At that point I left The Edge to go and work on SWIV at the Sales Curve. ”

So we can confirm that we are looking for a very early development version of the game, with at least one level to look at. Could another developer have picked up the game later to do more?… We are not sure yet.

In 2013, Jonathan Kendall told GTW64 that he was the programmer that Tahir was likely referring to. Jonathan had started the C64 version of the game, and left after deciding he didn’t like anything about how the conversion was being handled and would be better to return to independent projects. The game was being developed by Zeit Corps.

Jonathan also mentioned that he wasn’t sure for sure if the Darius+ version continued following his departure from Zeit Corps. We are not sure how much got started exactly, we assume just the first level and hope it may be findable.

However, what is quite interesting is that ACE magazine reviewed the Atari ST version (Thanks to Martin/Stadium 64 for the heads up) and had a quick box out for the C64 version which doesn’t seem quite right. They say very little apart from that it holds up pretty well as a conversion, is still recognizably and playably Darius. Fast, colourful, and nicely animat- …. and it cuts off. The final score was 705 to give a good SEU conversion by the sounds of things. But did they *really* actually see a C64 conversion?… or was this just a load of old fluff?…

Pete Dabbs additionally tells us that he approached The Edge to actually convert the game, but their demands for the C64 were way too high, and after a argument The Edge felt they could find someone else who could do the job. Maybe they did after reading the ACE review?

Another recent thing could be that CRL’s Inner Space contains bits of Darius+ from the C64, at least on the 4th-6th levels possibly. Jason Kelk suggesting that one of the later levels looks very much like a Darius+ level. Considering Inner Space contains a mixture of sprites and bits from other C64 games, could it also contain something unused from a C64 conversion of Darius+?….

Well, finally in August 2013 – Jonathan dug out his work disks and found the remains of his Darius + work. Don’t get too excited, as it is the result of only a few days work and is just the scroll engine for the game. Download the source zip and do the following…

1) Load “LOADANGEN”

2) > LOAD “TRIP.L”

3) > ASM,M

4) > SYS CALL

And that’s it!…. We’ll get assembled versions added very soon. There are slight varients on the same disk, along with a few other bits of source code which Jonathan has written and has allowed us to share.

It is possible that Tahir still has his graphics for the first level, and if so – Jonathan has offered to patch in the graphics so we can see particially more of what may have been. But for now, this seems to be all there ever was of a Darius + conversion on the C64!

Almost case closed!

Now this is a GTW that has gone down in history as one of the most eagerly wanted games to appear on the C64 in some form. For many years we have been taunted with the fantastic screenshots from Zzap 64 and the infamous Cyberdyne Interviews.

Deadlock was worked on for a number of months over the space of approximately 2 years and promised very much in the way of an Impossible Mission type game crossed with the likes of Trantor and Armalyte (With insights into the game from Zzap 64.).

It’s team was infact Cyberdyne Systems, the very people who did Armalyte. It looked and promised to be a ground breaking game, with stunning visuals from Robin Levy, code from Dan Phillips and music by Reyn Ouwehand. Even there was some sound effects by Martin Walker to add to Reyn’s music.

To say that the game was groundbreaking was an understatement. Deadlock was far ahead of its time and featured some of the most authentic and ambitious graphics and animational detail to feature in a C64 game. We are talking major detail in a game from 1989/1990, from its realistic walking and jumping to its realistic gun recoil and reload animations. It was essentially very much like a 8-bit version of Super Metroid! (Quite scarily actually!) Sadly it was to be the graphics which killed the game stone dead.

Ultimately it all boiled down to the fact that the game had been wrapped up so much in its awesome visuals directed by Robin, that playability was terminal. This was the opinion of Cyberdyne, and they even admit that compared to Armalyte, this game was not fun to work on. Fun was a crucial element in Cyberdyne’s production phases. System 3 at the time were still confident to see this stunning blaster make a release, and even got Reyn to compose a set of tunes which were to be never used (Apart from one being cheekily used in their cartridge version of Myth).

What also didn’t help was the fact that both Dan and Robin were dragged away to work on Last Ninja 3 (Dan on the Intro) and so the whole project was shelved for the time being and overall for the rest of its days. It was mentioned in an interview that the game would likely be resurrected after Last Ninja 3 and turned into a more Shinobi styled game. It never happened…

And so Deadlock, after several dozen previews and incarnations, suffered an unfortunate death and was sentanced to life on its development disks. That is until GTW became live, and Dan Phillips got in contact.

Out of the blue one day back in around 2000, GTW recieved an email from Dan, giving tons of information on his titles and also the last reminants of Armalyte 2. Deadlock was also promised, after permission was gained from System 3. After attempts to gain contact with System 3, no reply was ever heard, and a relaunch later in 2003, Christmas 2003 saw a GTW update which Dan gave permission to GTW to finally distribute the remains of what is a fantastic work of art.

Dan kindly supplied GTW with 4 very different previews of Deadlock (As different as possible) to give you the best possible view of how the game was. Finally you can throw those old screenshots away and check out a slice of Cyberdyne history for yourself, and you may just get a shock at how good those amazing stills move!

In December 2010, GTW preserved some disks from John Kemp and Robin Levy, and found a large number more of early previews and variations. We have added all of these to the download, and the very early previews are quite different!

In addition to this, there are some of the editors used to build the levels and some of the graphics to take a look at.

Finally, the disks themselves had a few labels which included some awesomely drawn bits of art for Deadlock. You can now download all of these labels in the options above. But here is one in particular from Robin:

Brendan Phoenix in recent times found a little leaflet from System 3 which mentioned Deadlock as an up and coming title. Here is is.

In 2013, R0bin Levy designed a loading screen for the game, which we have added to the gallery and that you can also download to run on the real machine.

A lost relic found, and here for you to see…