Games That Weren't^®

Recently highlighted in a recent interview in 2010 with David Crane, Retro Gamer issue 79 established from David Crane that the driving segments and car building scenes in the famous Ghostbusters game was originally meant for another game.

Already in production was a game called Car Wars, which allowed you to build up your car and kit it out and then drive around.

Thanks to Fabrizio Bartoloni, we learn that from the Retroist website some more details about Car Wars:

“To begin with, Ghostbusters did not start off life as the Ghostbusters game. It was going to be a game about buying cars, tricking them out,and dueling them against other cars around a fictional city. David had worked on the game for about a month had the car drawn and working and had begun to make some of the weapons for the car, when he got a call from fellow Activision co-founder Gary Kitchen.

Kitchen had received a call from the movie company who was publishing the Ghostbusters movie and they asked Kitchen if he would be willing to create a game for the movie that would come out the same day as the movie. Anyone besides me smell the potential for another E.T. here? Well not where David Crane is concerned. Kitchen called Crane to his office and told him the situation with the Ghostbusters license.

Crane immediately sat down and figured out a way to change his car dueling game into the Ghostbusters franchise with only minor changes and additions, and the deal was signed. Crane and Activision delivered the first truly successful movie licensed game in history.”

When Ghostbusters came along, there was only 6 weeks to get the game out – so Car Wars and its car building elements was ideal and taken and turned into part of Ghostbusters instead to save time.

But what of the original game? … How much different would it have been compared to the Ghostbusters incarnation, and would the driving sections have differed much? Is there also a version of Car Wars still around to this day? … maybe with some unused music or anything else?

It’s early days yet – but we believe that David Crane may have been behind the original code. Maybe he still kept something of this long lost C64 game?….

Could anything of this be found?…

Vague time now, as we take a very quick look at another title from the guys at Cyberdyne Systems in the days of producing the likes of Armalyte and Deadlock.

All we know is that there was a Car game in production by the guys which was to be an 8-way scrolling race game based on RALLY SPEEDWAY by Commodore.

This would have featured a whole range of hi-tec gadgets and effects to bring the game to a futuristic update.

This was a small game that was in production during larger developments. It’s possible that John Kemp was the programmer of this game with Robin Levy providing graphics.

We hope that soon Dan may find something of this game, but for now we wait…

Capture the Flag is a brilliant two player 3D maze game which was available on a whole host of systems, such as the Atari and even the Vic 20!

The game was way ahead of its time, and gave a simple Capture The Flag game where you had to
capture your opponents flag and get back to base.

The C64 version was advertised in magazines along with the Atari and Vic 20 versions.

The C64 did get a conversion of "Way Out", which was a very similar game by the same developer around the same time. So why did the C64 never get a release of this particular game?… If a Vic 20 could manage it, then surely a C64 could too?

Anyway, today we are still without this conversion around 23 years on and we hope to find out exactly what happened to it. Contributor John has been looking for the game himself for many years without any joy.

Can you help us find out more about this almost non-existant conversion?…

Where has this game gone?…

To milk the success of the then popular super hero, who saved the planet from pollution with his friends (All of which had special powers based on the 5 main elements of the planet), Mindscape cashed in by gaining the rights to a home computer conversion.

The adverts were pasted in all the magazines, which advertised that the game was due for the 8-bits. The game appeared on the Amiga, as a average platform game (Which was to me quite enjoyable). It simply involved you controlling each character from the game on a level relating to their special element power (Fire, Earth, Water, Wind, Heart etc), and having to rid of all the pollution. It was very Mario-esq in certain ways.

The game also surfaced on the Spectrum and Amstrad. Dave Perry and Nick Brunty did the Spectrum/CPC versions in record time.

As for the C64 version, well, nothing was ever heard apart from the odd news snippet, and a longish stay on Commodore Format’s Early Warning scanner, before completely disappearing in early 1992.

There were rumors that either Tony Crowther or Jason Kingsley were behind the C64 conversion. Jason Kingsley has been credited to the Amiga version along with Tony Crowther, but both have in recent times confirmed that they never worked on a C64 version.

So maybe it was just Probe? Nick Jones and Neil Coxhead of course were developing still at the time. However Nick Bruty confirmed that Probe were only ever contracted to do the Spectrum and Amstrad versions of the game. This of course is really strange – as the C64 had the stronger market of the 3 machines.

We spoke to David Amor and Richard Leinfellner, who worked at the Mindscape UK headquarters at the time.

They confirmed that no C64 version ever got started, as they were not able to find a suitable C64 developer who could create a game quickly enough. Nick Bruty and Dave Perry had pre-set libraries ready to go, so were able to get a conversion together in very short time (believed to be off the back of Paperboy 2) – but there were no such options available on the C64 to them. They decided not to pursue the C64 version and quietly scrapped it.

Sadly it means there is nothing to find of a conversion and it is very much a case closed on a long running mystery!