Games That Weren't^®

I don’t think we can call this a game, but more of a simulation of somekind. You may all remember those "Life" sims that used to be widespread on all machines, well this is another attempt.

This one is very poor, and to me, seems just like a char filled screen with a cursor to delete circles.

Its terrible basically, and it would take a miricle for the programmer to progress from this stage and create something ground breaking.

Highly unlikely that the game made it any further than this…

Awful… try and sell this to a company…

Many moons ago in the pages of Commodore Scene, their news pages stated about a conversion of Civilization being on the cards for the C64 by Megastyle. As often with many of the PC based conversions mentioned at the time, it was dismissed as being vapourware.

For years we never knew how much of this one was ever started, if started at all – but in 2012, Ruben Spaans came forward and confirmed that the game conversion was real…

"This project was way too ambitious, I guess. I did a lot of thinking (about data structures, some high-level code design), but in the end I only made this tiny map demo. Scroll using the arrow keys. There are grey areas where I planned to have a menu and a sidebar with stats (same screen layout as the PC version)."

Ruben very kindly passed on the remains of his conversion, which as mentioned is just a scrolling map – but confirms that there was to be a conversion, just unfortunately was found to be a bit too ambitious in the end.

This was all that ever existed of the conversion, and unfortunately it will never be completed!

Case closed!

Another Jon Wells title which sadly seems to have got lost along the way.

I first read about City Bomber whilst Jon was wrote a special diary for Commodore Force. As well as working on “Escape From Arth”, Jon was working on a neat title based on a classic Vic 20 game called “Bomber Run” by K-Tel on a Double Sider tape. Bomber Run had you flying over a blue cityscape, and you had to bomb all the buildings to eventually land. It was pretty much done in BASIC, but it was very impressive and certainly very addictive.

Jon too found the game as addictive as I did, and began creating a modernised version for the C64. It was modernised in the sense of graphics and sound obviously, and of course scrolling and other effects; but you particularly had an extra objective…. You had to save so many people, by picking them up before you bomb the ground to death.

A good idea, but slightly flawed in the preview which came out on Commodore Format’s powerpack. You see, it was so tricky and you had to be pixel perfect to pick the people up… most time you would end up crashing your ship. But also some people were stuck inside buildings, and you couldn’t reach them anyway (Bombing near by could set them alight). It may have been possible to complete the level, but I certainly couldn’t without a cheat.

Anyway, apart from the minor problem, the game itself was a great update to the classic theme, and instantly I signed up and pre-ordered the game along with Escape From Arth and Blitz 2000.

Sadly after time went past, Jon had sales problems with EFA and Blitz 2000. About 20 people in total bought both games, which wasn’t enough jusitification for Jon to finish off the other games. The enthusiam should have earnt the support of many to keep the games scene alive, but it didn’t. City Bomber got shelved, and was put on the back burner. Supportware offered City Bomber a lifeline, but again after failings of this new scheme, City Bomber remained on the shelf.

Today, the game still remains incomplete… and it seems a very very long way off to ever seeing the light of day. Jon tells me that the game is basically complete, and just requires some minor tweaking. It *could* be released one day, but at the moment we have a GTW.

In addition to the above, the game sported some awesome music by Feekzoid and Chris Lightfoot. Feekzoid did the main tune, which was squeezed into 2 channel for Jon to include sfx aswell. Chris Lightfoot provided the ship selection tune, where you could choose a particular ship to fly (A neat touch).

Graphically the game was not spectacular, but a little bit more paint work would soon fix any minor bits. After seeing Blitz 3000, Jon could easily improve things.

So now we wait and see if a finished game will ever surface… otherwise GTW will one day be hosting a nearly complete game. It will be out someday, but lets just hope its not in here with the rest of the unfinished gems.

Awesome little game which should be finished….

Citadel 2 is a rather old project that came to light during the making of "Berzerk Redux" recently, Martin Piper’s C64 conversion of the arcade game. When Martin needed some music to add to the game, he found a piece written by Alan Peters back in 1992 for the unfinished Citadel II. We approached Martin and asked if there was anything left of the project.

Martin spoke about the game and said about the music, "The music was originally composed by Alan (back in 1992) for a top down scrolling city type of game (a lot like Citadel ) we were working on, the working title was actually "Citadel II" *ahem*. So the music was composed to fit with the rushing around corridors with robots chasing you, so I thought it would fit this game too."

Martin looked through his work disks and found an early demo of Citadel II. Martin’s comment is "It is definitely a technical proof of concept demo and only contains placeholder graphics, sound and rough game play." It is definitely very similar to Citadel in style, with teleporters moving between sides/areas of a maze and door barriers (which can be shot to get through, closing shortly afterwards).

Overall this was a game being done mostly for fun it seems, with no commercial gain. But check out the preview for yourself and see what could have been. Very early, but very promising!

Another title salvaged and preserved – case closed!…

Alligata produced quite a few classic titles and shot certain developers like Tony Crowther to fame. Towards 1986, and sadly Alligata was to be no more, and so it was laid to rest. In 2005, James Grayson loaned GTW a batch of 40 disks which were Alligata master disks sold at a bootfair in Sheffield. On one of these disks was a bugged and early preview of a game called “Circus Fun!”, produced by Stephen Kellett who did other games for Alligata and later Players as far as we are aware.

After some rather nervy disk conversion from a dying disk, we managed to get all of the game ported across without fail and got the thing running.
It is a miracle that the demo disk has survived, and this could be the last remaining copy of the game. GTW has luckily salvaged and saved it for people to see.

What you’ll find is a very early, and sadly quite bugged clone of Bigtop Barney (Or Circus Charlie by Konami as its better known in the arcades…).

The game consists of controlling a clown on top of a lion who has to jump through hoops of fire. There are money bags, which you would think are collectable, but these actually kill you if you collide with them. It was hard to progress far into the game, mainly because of the poor collisions and the bugs. One fatal bug seems to be when you lose 2 lives, and the game gets stuck in a never-ending loop. Thanks to Jaymz Julian, we were surprised to find that the game is not just a one level preview, but there is in fact much more here than meets the eye.

In total, there are 5 levels which match the arcade game Circus Charlie. Unfortunately, the game is so bugged that you will have to freeze at regular points like Jaymz did to actually reach the later parts. Thanks to Jaymz we can present screenshots of how the game looks at each level. Although we haven’t seen the later levels, from Jaymz account of the game, we can see that if the game was bug fixed, we’d have something rather nice here. We hope that in the future someone will be able to take a look at the game and fix it for people to enjoy.

Some story behind the game, Alligata commissioned Stephen to produce the game for them. However, after pretty much completing the game – Alligata didn’t like what they saw and cancelled the release. Stephen sadly never got paid (See full story in creator speaks). Alligata shouldn’t have really kept hold of the game, but it is lucky they did!

So we learn of how the game came about, and us discovering it seems to have been a pure fluke really. A chance that Alligata kept all their disks. But it seems there could be a better version available, including even a music score. Steve has promised to check his disks, as he probably still has the sources.

Exciting news, and hopefully we are very close now to closing the case on this one!…