Our next title is a little thin on the ground at this stage, but we believe there is a strong case that a Commodore 64 edition was on the cards.
Ixion was a SEGA arcade title that never saw release in the arcades along with its planned home conversions. The home conversions known at this stage are for the Atari 2600, Atari 800 and also Commodore Vic-20.
What is interesting is that the Atari 800 edition that has leaked includes credits to U.S. Gold, who released a number of SEGA titles on their label in the UK. Pretty much any SEGA title that saw release on the Vic-20 was also on the cards for the C64, so we’d be very surprised if there wasn’t one.
The question, who exactly could have been working on it? Perhaps someone who worked on one of the other SEGA titles of the time?
If you know anything more, please get in touch!
Our next entry is a title that was being worked on by Robert Wilson back in 1989 and was recently discovered again on his old work disks.
The game itself is a sideways scrolling shooter with a guy on a jet pack, inspired by titles such as Zybex and Phobia. The game didn’t get very far overall, as Robert feels he was distracted by the Amiga at the time. A title screen was created, with a basic control demo with no enemies.
It is hoped that the game could be tidied up and added to the site in the future, though Robert is suggesting that he may even finish the game off, which would be even better. For now, check out the screenshots that Robert has created and we hope to bring you more news in the future.
A slightly different and combined entry for a number of titles now, which was thanks to a suggestion by contributor Ken Knight.
Ken submitted two SEUCK titles which appeared to be magazine rejects – crediting Zzap and Commodore Force, but never appearing on the magazines. We thought it would be a good idea to slowly pull together various titles that were intended for a magazine covertape/disk (clearly outlined by the title screens for instance), but never quite made it.
Of course, we already have a number of titles in the archive which have separate entries, which we will just link below for now. Here is a list that we have so far:
- A Chance in Hell – 3DCK game that was intended for release on Commodore Format / Commodore Force.
- Vietnam (SEUCK) – Intended for Commodore Format in 1993
- SEGA Blaster (SEUCK) – Intended for Commodore Force magazine in 1993
- Dying High – Intended for Zzap!64 in 1992, but rejected due to a supposed bug, found and preserved by GTW
- House Case (SEUCK) – Intended for Commodore Format in 1995, but ran out of tape!
- The Absolute Beginning (SEUCK) – Intended for Zzap!64 in 1992, but rejected
- Alien Realms (SEUCK) – Another from the author of The Absolute Beginning that was submitted later on in 1994. This was sent along with Blue Encounter, a poorer game in comparison and sadly never used. Fully paid for but never used.
- Psyclaps (SEUCK) – Early entry by Richard Bayliss, credited Commodore Format 1994.
- Smasher 2 – A hack of Breakout Construction Kit, seemingly submitted to Commodore Format in 1994
- Speed Runner – A Tron game seemingly written for Commodore Format for 1994 publication.
- Galactic Chaos – The dev team had already done Relax and Battle Bars for Commodore Force, but oddly CF didn’t publish this neat little shooter done for them in 1993.
- Retro Torque – Paul Black jazzed up his old Turbo Kart Racer game with motorbikes and tried to sell it to Commodore Force in 1993. Oddly it wasn’t picked up.
- Dive Bomber – BASIC Blitz clone intended for the fanzine Commodore Cracker
- Moon Gods – vertical scrolling shooter that was being produced for the fanzine Commodore Scene. Never finished.
- Savage Platforms – single screen platformer by Mike Berry that was intended for release on the fanzine Commodore Scene. Lost in a burglary.
- Warspite – Neat Delta clone by Phil Ruston submitted to various publishers and never taken up. Was sent to Commodore Disk User, paid for but never published. It was later leaked via the Fusion cracking crew.
- Cyber Squidgies (SEUCK) – Very cool looking Creatures style game submitted to Zzap!64 in 1992 and rejected for being too similar to Creatures in the graphics.
- Zanaton (SEUCK) – Submitted to Zzap!64 in 1992 and rejected.
- Toys (SEUCK) – Submitted to Zzap!64 in 1992 and rejected, later released to Binary Zone PD.
- Klaboom (SEUCK) – Submitted to Zzap!64 in 1992 and rejected, later released to Binary Zone PD.
- Fly Pig (SEUCK) – Submitted to Zzap!64 in 1992 and rejected, later released to Binary Zone PD.
- Twin Tigers – Alf Yngve’s game was submitted to Zzap!64 in 1992 by Kenz and rejected, later released on Commodore Format though!
- Tau Omega -Alf Yngve’s game was submitted to Zzap!64 in 1992 by Kenz and rejected, later released in the Binary Zone PD library.
- Tau Zero – Alf Yngve’s game was submitted to Zzap!64 in 1992 by Kenz and rejected, later released in the Binary Zone PD library.
- Tots TV – SEUCK Game (clone of Smash TV) that was seemingly submitted to Commodore Format, but never picked up.
- Alienator ’93 – Alf Yngve’s game was submitted to Zzap!64 in 1992 by Kenz and rejected, later released in the Binary Zone PD library.
- Attack of the Mutant Ninja Turtles (SEUCK) – Alf Yngve’s game was submitted to Zzap!64 in 1992 by Kenz and rejected due to licence concerns, later released in the Binary Zone PD library with a slight tweak as Attack of the Mutant Ninja Blueberries.
- Rockus – Lost a competition, but usually would have been put on 64’er magazine’s covermount.
If you know of more, let us know – there will be a lot of obvious ones that we have missed – but the aim is to grow this list over time. Hopefully some day we’ll hear some stories about the submissions and rejections.
A wonderful and surprising finding to enter the GTW64 archives, thanks to the efforts of Genesis Project in late February 2021.
Splish Splash is a previously unknown game that was intended for release on the Mastertronic budget label back in 1985. The game itself was written by Adrian Sheppard, who around the same time had/was converting One Man and His Droid to the C64. Adrian would later go on to develop Vampire and Grand Prix Simulator for Codemasters, as well as Pipe Mania for Empire.
The game was randomly found on an obscure set of Italian C64 disks as a frozen file, and has now been tidied up and bug fixed for release. Just how it got out is a mystery, though we suspect that the game was submitted to Mastertronic and someone there leaked the game out. We have managed to track down Adrian and hope to learn more shortly about the game and what happened to it exactly.
You must guide Splish through the factory using the lift to take him to each floor and place buckets under the holes in the pipes. When a bucket is full, or partly full, you must throw the water through a window at the left of each floor. A very simple, but fun concept overall which would have made a reasonably decent budget release at the time (especially compared to the guff like Bionic Granny that was released!).
So whilst we try and find out more about the background to game, waste no time in checking out the title for yourself and what has been a nice early surprise to 2021 thanks to the Genesis Project group!
A short entry for what should have been a C64 game as well as PC and Amiga (with thanks to Allan Pinkerton for highlighting!). This SSI game saw release for various formats in 1989/1990 by Strategic Simulations Inc., but the promised C64 version listed in adverts as “coming soon” was never to be.
Why though? SSI went on to release Buck Rogers – Countdown to Doomsday and Champions of Krynn, so was there some kind of development hitch?
More research is needed, but we are for now replicating the credits of those other two games released around that time – as we believe one or more of them may have been involved in the C64 conversion of Sword of Aragon.
If you know anything more about the conversion, please do get in touch!
Our next entry into the C64 archives was a huge surprise when it was revealed by Ocean’s stalwart – Paul Hughes in February 2021.
When CommodoreBlog posted a tweet showing the title screen from the NES version of Robocop 2, Paul Hughes commented that there was also a version being worked on in-house at the time, but was dropped and taken over with a new development by Painting By Numbers.
After a bit more digging by Paul, he recalled that the developer was none other than Rick Palmer, developer of the C64 version of New Zealand Story. This was confirmed when finding the source code again, which revealed that the graphics were by Steve Wahid and Brian Flanagan. Music hadn’t been decided at this point, but its likely it would have just been the music that Jon Dunn eventually composed.
The date was 1990, and ironically, Paul was working on the NES version originally with Bill Harbison – when the decision was suddenly made to just stop all work and hand everything over to Paint By Numbers. Paul suggests it may have been because it was cheaper to get them to do a bunch of versions together.
It is unknown at this stage just how far the internal developments got, or how different it fared from the eventual released edition. We think it would have been much closer to the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad (+GX4000) editions which were done in house.
Brian Flanagan mentioned in an interview with Retro Gamer that he recalls doing background mock-ups and sprites and was really wanting to work on the game. He did some cool looking sprites, then all of a sudden were asked to stop work. He doesn’t know why either.
The potentially good news is that we may find out exactly how far, as along with the source code – Paul confirmed the graphics files are present too. Hopefully we may get to see something running very soon once Paul has a bit more time to compile up
Watch this space!
Daxis was a combination of both Darryl Still and Gary Partis’ name, and was an idea by Darryl, which Gary and Peter Scott agreed would be possible to create. The game itself would be a combination of vertical shoot-em-up and platforming action over different levels.
Darryl though suggested that the game was to try and included every aspect of every successful game ever of the time. An ambitious project overall. The game was being developed by Gary on the Commodore 64, with Peter handling the BBC Micro version.
Not much else is known about the game, but when Darryl left Audiogenic, it seemed that the project died out early on. Gary feels he probably only coded a high-score table at most when speaking in the 2021 ABug 10 video.
Although parts of the BBC game have been recovered already, Gary’s C64 work has yet to be preserved. It is hoped that he will be going through all his work disks in the future, so we may yet get to see something of this title.
