Games That Weren't^®

ALA Software were an obscure company from the US who defined their games as “Games with Guts”. They were part of a mother company called ALA Enterprises (which was a record label). All software was written by General Masters Corporation.

Unfortunately some of the software for the C64 never surfaced it seems, and at present the following games are missing:

• Firestorm
• Superbrain
• Proton Warhead

Thanks to Marco Das, it’s been highlighted that School Tech Word Search has been found and preserved. We’ve added some scans that Marco has kindly provided. The game is also in Gamebase64.

Contributor Bryan Caudle from the Virginia Computer Museum also found a copy of Proton Warhead on sale, which confirms it does exist. We’ve added a photo here. It just needs to be preserved, so hopefully it will get picked up soon.

Basically quiz and intelligence games. Here is a scan of the advert. We are hopeful of these actually being out there, and we just need to get them digitally preserved.

Can you help us?

A rather interesting story with another game which had an earlier version … but one which was infinitely better it seems than what was eventually released. Airwolf 2 was released on the Hitpak collection. It was a Nemesis clone, with Airwolf set oddly in space!

However, it seems there is a rather bizarre link between Airwolf 2 and Starline. You see, Airwolf 2 was indeed to be a clone of Nemesis in terms of game play, but also was to feature some awesome graphics in bitmap mode.

Arthur Gill had the following to say after checking out Starline:

“I told you a while ago that one of the games Stu was working on had graphics that looked just like the arcade version of ‘nemesis’ and was infinitely better than the official konami c64 version that was released. The game was Airwolf 2.

The ‘bitmap scroll’ screen you mention in the ‘shots’ section shows the mountain from nemesis, and that is the GFX’s that stu originally was sent! I recall it perfectly, as he created the twin volcano spitting fireballs section (heck entire level as I recall 20 years later) as a demo. The trees also look similar, but in “starline” they are much larger then the ones Stu had received form Bob.

It seems the GFX’s did eventually get used elsewhere.. :) This is what Airwolf 2 was ‘originally’ going to look (a bit) like. You can tell Stu my memory still works, If you like!”

Very interesting indeed. it is now a case of checking what Bob and Stu have to say and see if a demo can be found. I wonder how much it improves over the released game. Why was this one scrapped? – was it the same reasons as with Starline and Touchlight?

Another interesting bit of info is that the game that was released actually has an entire level tucked away which was accessible only via a SYS code. Anyone know what this was or how to access it? Apparently there was a poke in Zzap 64 disclosing the extra level (which was dropped apparently for being too easy).

It would be interesting to locate Stu Cook’s demos from CNET which had the fireball spitting feature. Does anyone have it?

More information needed…

Before Elite got the licence for Airwolf, Ocean Software actually started producing the home computer conversions.

Although it was advertised for the Spectrum in the scan, it was infact also planned for the C64 until Elite Software won a legal battle to write the game.

Elite got their conversion released during 1985, and Ocean advertised their game at late 1984. It could be very possible that the game reached an advanced state.

Just how the game would have been is currently unknown… Possibly the game would have had a different aim and perspective compared to the Elite version.

It is possible that ideas from the scrapped Airwolf game were used in other games that Ocean did… possibilities could include the Helecopter section in Rambo II and in even Streethawk. This is speculation and my own possibilities.

The Spectrum version on World of Spectrum had the following:

Jonathan Smith reminisces: “Dan had the misfortune to be the programmer of Ocean’s ill fated version of ‘Airwolf’, a game based around the American television series about a helicopter that can fly dead fast, with guns.

Elite Software famously managed to acquire the official licience from under their rival company’s nose. Ocean only had a ‘handshake agreement’ with the distributor.

The project had to be cancelled and Dan’s work shelved.”

The developer who Jonathan referred to was Dan Hartley, who did Duet and also Daley Thompson on the ZX Spectrum. What is interesting is that Dan had a helecopter game released in the same year by Software Super Savers called Super Chopper. Could this have been the original Airwolf game, rebadged and modified?

Or maybe Helecopter Jagd was infact the original Airwolf game, held up and released after the storm had calmed under a different name. The loading screen looks very Airwolf like.

What is very clear now is that code work was actually started with the Ocean version of the game. It is still unknown who was behind the C64 version, it could have been Ian Thompson, Rawells, John Hutchinson, David Collier, David Selwood, Andrew Taylor or even Tony Pomfret.

At least for the Spectrum edition, we now know that the author re-hashed the game and released it as Super Chopper with Software Super Savers (Software Project’s budget label). What of the C64 edition though?

A very quick entry, but in an article by Commodore Format and written by Gary Penn, it was mentioned that Gary Liddon had written a game called Advanced Soccer Simulator for Codemasters back in the day which was never released.

This is news to us, but it is another Codemasters unreleased game which we can add.

We hope to get hold of Gary at some point to pick his brains about this game.

More soon we hope!