Games That Weren't^®

Our next title is a graphic text adventure that was being produced by St. Brides and was started as far back as 1985. Featured in issue 45 of Sinclair User in particular when the School team was working on a new batch of games.

Thanks to an article at 8bitag.com, we learn that the original plan was for the software to be distributed with a comic book. At the time it was being developed using Quill and Illustrator, and was felt needed a new and more powerful system to write it. By the time it was released by GI Games in 1989 on the ZX Spectrum, it had already been moved over to Professional Adventure Writer.

It was heavily delayed, but eventually made it and was worth the wait – scoring highly in magazines, including a 9/10 in Your Sinclair. The plan though had been to always release the game on other formats. It was confirmed that Gilsoft’s Tim Gilberts worked on the conversion, but the company had gone bust before he was paid. The conversion was completed though, and used Gilsoft’s C64 PAW/Illustrator interpreter.

A document was shared with 8bitag.com which we have included in the “Creator Speaks” section below. Sadly though the conversion is still very much at large, but we hope to find out more from Tim soon and establish if anything has survived of the conversion.

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!

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.
• S.A.S – Saunders & Simpson in Operation Kuran – Submitted to Commodore Force in 1993 and rejected. Preserved and saved by Andrew Fisher for the SEUCK Vault from the submitted tape.
• 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 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.

Thanks to contributor Chris Hester, who flagged up an old piece that he wrote possibly for his magazine Adventure Coder. Valley Of The Source was to be the follow-up to Twin Kingdom Valley and was due for release around March 1985.

It was suggested that the game will involve the player in a search for the source of the River of Gold. From that suggestion, the game had been delayed to November 1985. The title was apparently to include half a million locations, each with four full-screen graphic views, animated sword-fights, interactive characters and a host of other astounding features.

Trevor Hall was reportedly working on the game, but everything went dead with nothing more surfacing about the game. He later told Mark Hardisty in Classic Adventurer (issue 1) that the project was shelved when Bug-Byte collapsed, owing Trevor “oodles” of royalty payments.

Thanks to Fabrizio Bartoloni, we learn that in the July 1989 issue of “Adventure Coder” – it features Valley of the Source at page 20 trying to find out what was of the game and its 500.000 promised locations where the player should find the source of the River of Gold from the first TKV.

Each location would have four views in full screen size à la Lords of Midnight along with animated sword fights. It also says the game would have been released at the end of 1985 and solely for the C128 in light of its many demanding features.

But with the game worked on for a good period of time, could something substantial still exist that could be saved and shown?