Games That Weren't^®

Mentioned in issue 15 of Zzap 64, Cops and Robbers is a working title of a game which CRL were going to be releasing in August 1986, but never quite did. (Check out the feature on CRL here). Thanks to Gurt from the Lemon64 forum for highlighting this one!

The game is not the Atlantis based game of the game name either. The game was being developed by Jeff Lee, designing the graphics as well as writing the game itself. The game consists of you controlling a burglar robbing a range of houses, ranging from derelict and semi-detatched, and eventually the Police Commissioner’s mansion – the ultimate in burglary.

Within the game would be a lengthy scrolling street which scrolls left and right, and any of the buildings can be entered at any time. Once inside a building, the view changes to that of the room you are about to burgle. Here you grab all the various rich pickings, but must avoid the heavy protection in some properties with various security traps and systems.

To bypass certain security, you need to obtain good equipment to do so – this is done by selling your gains and purchasing new tools.

What quite happened to this game is beyond me – apart from that, there doesn’t seem to be any other mention of the game or screenshots anywhere. No Spectrum version seemed to get out either.

Clem Chambers spoke to GTW64 and suggested that this was probably nothing more than a concept that didn’t get much further. Cops and Robbers wasn’t the sort of name they would commonly give, and would have been a working title. This does not however completely rule out that nothing was ever started.

Main thing as well is that we have a coder to track down and find out more about the game, but for now do you know any more about this one?

Can you help with this entry?

Another game, and another title which seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth.

Cop Out was one of the last games to be released by Mikro-Gen, with the advert showing the last incarnation of the logo. The game actually did get a release on the Spectrum and Amstrad thanks to the work of the great Raffaele Cecco… http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0001063

The game is little more than a cross between Kane and Cabel, where you control a Cop who must clear 9 levels of thugs and various baddies (Even including a bi-plane!). It wasn’t a bad game, but recieved average marks in the various magazines.

Normally, Raffaele’s games were converted to the C64 by the great Nick Jones, so maybe Nick was working on this one before Mikrogen went under?…. Nick confirms that he had no involvement on the conversion, which suggests that this title may have been pushed externally – but to who?

Apart from the advert which states the game was going to be released for the C64, we know little about the C64 version. As far as we know, there were no C64 based screenshots in any of the magazines of the time.. We don’t know who was behind the C64 game or how far it got. A heck of a lot of research is required for this game.

Let the search begin…

A big game on the 16bits at the time… where you control the spot from 7-up, moving along the beach, collecting red spots and shooting crabs… It was a fun little platform game.

A C64 version was being planned out after a fair checkers clone featuring the Spot character. Unfortunatly, it didn’t quite make it…

Plans were scrapped as Virgin decided to move on, and only finish Alien 3 on the C64. The game could have played well on a C64, what with a successful 8bit translation onto the Master System and Gameboy.

But how far did the game get before it was scrapped though?…. No other details are currently known about who were working on the game. Quite possibly it may have been either the people behind MC Donaldland, or Alien 3.

May have been good, may have not…

Originally believed to be a separate game, this is infact a compilation of released games. Therefore this entry will be deleted in the near future.

Case closed!

Originally believed to be a separate game, this is infact a compilation of released games. Therefore this entry will be deleted in the near future.

Case closed!

Mentioned in TGM March 1989 Complex was to be a new Palace Software game on the C64 in 1989, and was mentioned in the March issue of The Games Machine. They described the game as follows: “And for future-shock fans, there’s Complex – a police-training course of a distant century, with 2000AD-style comic book graphics actually created by a comic artist.”

Very interesting. So was this a futuristic Combat School of sorts that never was? Well, we can’t really tell from this very basic description but there seems to be no evidence of the game on any format anywhere. Did this get caught up when Palace went under? Titus certainly never picked it up when they took over Palace, so this may be lost in the midst’s of time.

Maybe you know something about this game, or have even seen an advert somewhere? Just who was behind this game, and how far did it get?

In the articles linked in the gallery below, Jo Walker is mentioned as having done animation for C64 Barbarian. So, it seems reasonable that he was also involved in C64 Complex too, if there ever was such a version. The article implies that he was doing Complex for 16-bit. The game is also mentioned as late as 1991 in Swedish magazine Datormagazin, issue 5 1991, page 54:

“In the year 2061, Earth is still a wonderful planet – for criminals. Maintaining law and order has become a job for experts, and becoming an expert is only for those who pass Complex, the police training camp. Here, the prospective police officer must throw him- or herself between platforms and bull’s-eye the bad guys, while sparing innocent lives.

The game animations are in a league of their own and the character controlled by the player consists of 120 different frames. I’ve personally played an early version of the game, so I can confirm that the animations are of a very high standard. The game is also very fast, despite the version I saw containing more on-screen objects than the final version.

The player is awarded points by how he or she behaves in cornered situations, how many innocent lives have been lost and so on. Jo Walker, e.g. Barbarian II and Demoniak, is designing the game and 23-year-old Sean Pearce, e.g. World Games, Hardball and Platoon, is doing the programming.”

Looks like we need an ST/Amiga page for the game too! The question is, was a C64 version ever considered at all – Ross doesn’t think so (see comments), and we agree at the moment. It’s looking like this was vapourware!