Games That Weren't^®

A oriental game this time by Ariolasoft, we think mainly for their budget label Reaktor. This game name has been ringing around for a while now, though not to be confused with the Graftgold game called Bushido.

Things were a little cloudy for this game, but the coder was none other than Patricia Curtis (who was known as Delvin Sorrell at the time) who also did Super Robin Hood for Codemasters around the same time.

Power Play categorized Bushido Warrior in their 1987 PCW Show report as “Gauntlet Variant”. Gary Yorke confirmed this in 2006 and that himself and James Poole managed the development of the game for Ariolasoft. However, Patricia confirms that both didn’t manage the c64 version. The game was written in her and Steve’s own bedrooms with little interaction (if any) from Gary and James.

The game was actually completed and it was sold to Ariolasoft for an advance and expected royalties – but sadly never came out due to Ariolasoft going under. Patricia (looking back now) cannot understand why she didn’t sell the game onto another company.

Music was believed to have been by Tonal Teapot, but Patricia isn’t 100% certain. It may have even been Tony Crowther.

Developer David Semmens got in touch to confirm also that Source the Software House were behind the Spectrum and Amstrad versions (which also never saw release). We are hoping to learn more from David and to see if something could be at least saved of those versions.

Sadly, when we asked about the chances of getting hold of the game to release, Patricia gave the bad news that nothing was kept of the game. Steve was the same as well sadly, so it could almost be a case closed :(

Bubbles was a 2D, 4 directional scrolling shoot-em-up. Not really a metalic and violent shooter, but one made as a children’s shoot ’em up. This game was bought up by Jared Derret who has kindly shed light on a number of titles.

According to Jared, the game was shaping up rather weakly with no sandbox code really. There was conceptual art completed and some production art, but that was it. Sadly the game was shelved during its early stages to make way for another project. Once this new project was complete, they never re-opened Bubbles again.

Jay got in touch in 2013 and confirmed that the game was an attempt at getting into the fine pixel scrolling of sprites and overlapping masks. It was a kind of proof of concept for Jay. Apparently it got about half way and then Cookie came out – and the guys called it a day, feeling they couldn’t compete.

It is very unlikely that anything of this game will be salvaged in the future, but we will try to find something.

Mentioned on the title of Scorpion 2 for CDU, Bubble Blaster was only ever briefly known about just through this game.

Leslie Wigmore was not much of a well known character on the C64, but produced two decent games for CDU, so we can only assume that Bubble Blaster would have been a nice title also.

We are also assuming that the game would have eventually been put onto CDU, had the magazine not gone under at the time. It’s possible that most of the game was almost complete, or even complete… but Leslie decided not to complete it or publish it after the demise of CDU.

In recent years we’ve managed to get hold of Leslie, so we hope to learn more about the game and see even if something of it could be recovered.

Brute Force was a fairly unheard of arcade game by the creators of Ivan Ironman’s Offroad Racer, Leyland Corp. This was a double dragon style beat-em-up which featured your usual violence and weapons.

Not surprisingly, the game was planned for release on the C64, with Storm taking the conversion on. It is not known who exactly would have been doing the conversion, but it could have been Steve Snake and Rob Whitaker. The reports were originally made about the conversion in Zzap issue #76 on their news page. This was it however, and no more about the game was ever heard about.

Eventually, Storm did the conversion of Double Dragon 3…. so maybe the Brute Force game fell through, and they used code to create Double Dragon 3?…. It was possible, but unlikely.

Well, we can confirm that the game was never even started. The Double Dragon 3 link is not true, and Leyland’s title just was never to be. It may have been a plan once, but Rob confirms that it was just vapourware…

A shame, but it means we can close the door on this one…

Very quick entry, as we are lacking details at present.

A Bruce Lee game was mentioned in a PC Show 1988 article in Commodore User magazine to be developed by Grandslam.

Nothing more was heard, though we are sure a few more news items surfaced at somepoint with a bit more detail. We can only guess that Grandslam couldn’t afford the licence in the end and never secured it, so this could well be vapourware.

Do you know more?

Bruce Lee was a classic title on the C64 and other 8-bit systems, with its simplistic gameplay and cuteness (!)

To follow on from the success, Datasoft were to create a sequel title called Bruce Lee – Enter The Dragon.

Sam Poole, the president of Datasoft, spoke to Zzap 64 in issue 13 about various releases from Datasoft. It was here which he mentioned about Bruce Lee 2 and had the following to say:

"With Alternate Reality being such a massive project, taking such a long time to develop, did this mean future games would be based on the AR system? ‘Obviously as we’re designing and
developing the series, we’ve learned a great deal about random character generation, and logic and statistics. As a result, we are now looking to use some of those same types of features in a
follow up program based on Bruce Lee, which has been a major seller in Europe.

Called Bruce Lee – Enter The Dragon, it will be a full role-playing adventure and have strong hi-res graphics and animation sequences but taking advantage of some of the techniques we’ve developed in AR. Combining the best of both’."

Here planned was a much more advanced Bruce Lee title, building on the success of Alternate Reality and its strong game engine. We have a rough indication about what the game was actually like, but sadly no screenshots or any more of the game were ever heard of. It certainly sounded exciting for Bruce Lee fans!

This time, the game is likely to have been coded by the same guy behind the Alternate Reality series. So a lead that we can chase up for the time being. However, after almost 20 years, its gonna be hard to find much of this title…

Will this lost Bruce title ever be found?…