Games That Weren't^®

Compute!’s Gazette (May 1990) ran a news piece on this possible baseball game from arcade specialists Data East.

Bo was a superstar in the US, famous for playing both American Football and Major League baseball during his career as well as a famous Nike advert.

However, there does not seem to be a trace of the Commodore 64 game online.

There was a 1991 NES title called Bo Jackson Baseball, and a later Gameboy game featuring both baseball and American Football. From the description of downloading stats this is definitely a computer game and not just a console game.

But does anything still exist?

The Bod Squad was a great little budget platformer released late into the C64’s life back in 1992 by Zeppelin Games. The game had you controlling a cute green blob which had to go around various locations, including the Pyramids.

It was well recieved, though never caused a huge storm like maybe it should have. It’s a decent game which deserves more of a glowing mention these days. C64 Endings uncovered the end sequence for the game which details to look out for Bod Squad 2. And we believe that Bod Squad 2 made an appearance on the Commodore Format early warning scanner at somepoint.

It could have potentially been quite easy to create a sequel, as Kent may well have planned just to re-use the current engine with a different series of maps. But was any of this ever started?

Kent eventually went on to work on the SNES, so its possible something big came up before he could finish work on the game. Either that or Zeppelin had decided not to go ahead with a sequel (Maybe completion was too late into the C64’s life?)

We managed to catch up with Kent (http://www.evolvic.co.uk/), who had sad news. Unfortunately it was out of his hands, and Zeppelin decided against a sequel (Due to the declining C64 market). Kent had written a level designer with a sequel in mind, and in fact the original game was meant to be a much bigger game than was eventually released.

According to Kent, the original game demo (which was to be published by Digital Magic before they collapsed – previews appearing in magazines stating it was coming soon from that company), was sent out to multiple companies and the top of the list was Thalamus, but unfortunately they just got the demo at the point of them getting out of games (or their collapse). They mentioned to Kent that they would have snapped up Bod Squad if he was 6 months earlier with his submission, and the title would have been released at full price with all the levels.

In the end Zeppelin took on the game and it was rush released with 3 levels – a decision that Kent was not happy with. The rest of the levels would have been the sequel that never was.

As a result, the sequel is pretty much vapourware – unless Kent digs out the level editors and some of the long lost levels. But Kent is determined to do a release of the game which was as originally intended, and on his website (Link above) there is a new Flash development of Bod Squad which aims to have everything – so keep an eye out!

A shame it was never to be, and another case closed….

Bobby Yazz is a computerised game show, featuring various games to win prizes and the normal quiz routine you got with many computer based game shows. The fun novel approach was appealing to many, and the game received good reviews on the spectrum platform, to which it was eventually released on a covertape, and never at full price.

The Commodore 64 version was advertised, but never sadly surfaced anywhere, not even on a covertape. Therefore its unknown just how complete the C64 conversion was, and with no credits, it will be hard to find out exactly what happened.

What with the problems with Destiny/Big Apple software, it seems as if they may have gone under just before releasing Bobby Yazz. Although reviewed, Destiny (the other name for Big Apple) went under just before the game could be released. The Spectrum version surfaced thanks to going on the Crash Megatape. The C64 version was not so lucky.

Thanks to Strident, who was speaking with Destiny’s Francis Lee, we have been kindly passed on photos of the box packaging for the Commodore 64 version, which is (c) Francis Lee (https://talesofmidnight.com/).

It is hoped that we will find out soon what exactly happened to the conversion. Was it by the same development team as Yeti?

This game was announced in an issue of Home Computer Weekly back in 1985 and was to be sponsored by Sir Bobby Charlton.

It was promised that the game was to be very accurate and also featured input from Sir Bobby himself! … However, apart from a mention that it was being released on the BBC Micro first and the C64 and Spectrum later, it only surfaced on the BBC Micro and neither the C64 or Spectrum.

The game didn’t seem to be that well received, and we originally thought that perhaps the developer went bust shortly after the BBC Micro version was launched. However, owner of D.A.C.C, Derek Ashton got in touch and confirmed that the company didn’t go bust and continued on for many years until Derek’s retirement a few years ago. Derek had gone on to do very large scale database systems for banks, healthcare companies and even Microsoft.

Derek didn’t recall announcing a C64 version of Bobby Charlton Soccer, but we hope to learn more from Derek soon to update these pages.

We know little more than this at the moment, but maybe you can help?

Ok, a bit of a gap here with this one at present, but another title in the archive to be preserved at least as a memory for the time being.

This is another game for Mastertronic which had graphics by Haydn Dalton. We assume this was a follow on from the dire original game that had come out a number of years earlier. Possibly one of the Darlings were having an update done for Mastertronic? We are not sure.

GTW is touch with Haydn, so we hope to clear up this game a little bit more and find out some more. Haydn sadly does not have any disks these days, and chances of another “Solar Jetman” are remote. We need to identify the coder in a last ditch
effort to find more of this game.

Much more research needed for this one…

Yup, you guessed it!… another Beyond Belief title, this time brought to our attention by Marco Das, who found a little advert
from Beyond Belief stating about the game’s up and coming release.

Sadly we only know of a name, but nothing of the game itself.
This may have been Kickstart (another BB title) renamed, but we
are keen to find out before turning that theory into fact.

A lot of research required for this title, and as of yet we haven’t had any replies from Jim Scott about any of the games…

Could be a long slog finding anything of this one, or the rest!

More research needed…