Games That Weren't^®

Captain Courageous was an action game in the style of an Indiana Jones game, which was commissioned to Arcanum Developments to be completed. This team consisted of Mark Kelly, his brother, Robert McGowan, Barry Leitch and Alan Mac.

It was an ambitious title with every level a game in itself according to Alan. There were up/down scrolling commando style levels, diagonal scrolling levels where you went down a river in a dingy and a platform style game inside buildings. Sadly these were just on paper, or so was believed!

It was possible that these ideas may have been scrapped for something much simpler. According to Alan, it didn’t get very far, and he couldn’t remember doing any graphics for it other than the odd sprite and maybe a loading screen. Music was created by Barry Leitch, and is in HVSC labelled as Arcanum. This is all the music for the game, and you can download it here too.

Robert McGowan however remembers things differently, and confirms that the game was completed – but cannot recall why English Software didn’t release it. He recalls Alan having completed all the graphics for the game as well.

Robert reveals that the diagonal scrolling level was a river rapid scene where you had to avoid boulders and other objects. A horizontal scrolling shooting part had you having to clamber over objects and avoid being shot by enemies. A vertical scrolling climb had you leaping between 4 vines, avoiding falling boulders and enemies.

All of the code was pretty much done by Robert, who did all the graphics designing applications for sprites, scrolling blocks and the music driver. He had hacked turbo assembler to assemble out the parallel port of one C64 into the parallel port of another, as source and graphics couldn’t fit into one device.

The guys apparently weren’t paid well, and got paid basically in Kebabs! So they promptly left and did their own thing. Unfortunately the experience soured things for Robert to the point that he left the games industry.

C&VG had a brief news article on the game, with a shot of the game’s cover art (well, we believe it is as it accompanied the article), and said the following:

“Oh No!, It’s Captain Courageous – prettier than Rambo and twice as touch. Cap’n will be coming your way from English Software, after he’s dabbled in a bit of hair-raising jungle combat, perilous river rides, sniper attacks and a helicopter rescue bid. Available from September for the C64 on tape and disc at £8.95/£12.95”

So far, everyone we’ve asked about the game have confirmed that they no longer have anything of the game itself. This could be incredibly tricky to track down as a result – but you never know what could surface some day.

A game which probably many wouldn’t have chosen to licence, but Big Apple software did back in 1989 as they tried to make their mark on the computer game market.

Jason Kendal (Who also did Proton for Big Apple) and Hugh Binns were assigned to completing this licence.

The game according to Hugh was based on a decathlon style of gameplay with features such as bitmap screen scrolling and hi-res sprite overlays to enhance the look and feel of the game.

Just as the game was starting to progress, the parent company decided to cut funding and the Big Apple company was closed down as a result. No-one else took on the strange licence, and so the California Raisins met their doom.

Just how far the game reached is still unknown… hopefully something of the game will be found, maybe graphics or even some of the code. It may be down to finding Jason Kendal who will know more.

One thing is that i’m glad the cartoon doesn’t get shown anymore.. it was tripe. Wouldn’t mind seeing the game though… :)

Swept up in a large current…

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?