Games That Weren't^®

Thanks to contributor Chris Hester, who flagged up an old piece that he wrote possibly for his magazine Adventure Coder. Felix the Cat was the winning entry to a competition ran by Incentive Software (Write Your Own Adventure) to create an adventure game in Graphic Adventure Creator.

The competition was won by Nicholas Purser, and the plan was for Incentive to then code Nicholas’ ideas into a final published game.

Nothing ever surfaced though – so was it started, or was the game simply not good enough? Hopefully some day we will find out from Nicholas himself.

Thanks to contributor Chris Hester, who flagged up an old piece that he wrote possibly for his magazine Adventure Coder. Sorderon’s Shadow: The Legend of Elindor was a title by Nick Eatock and Simon Welland that was a sort of mix of Valhalla and Lords of Midnight. Denton contributed some character graphics to improve the game briefly, but that was it.

The game consisted of text input, a vocab of 750 words, interactive wandering characters and landscaping graphics. It saw release on the ZX Spectrum, and was due for release later on for the C64.

It was never to be though and the game was never to surface. The question is, was anything actually ever started on a C64 conversion? It seems that the game may well have got caught up when Beyond was sold to BT.

More soon we hope!

Thanks to contributor Chris Hester, who flagged up an old piece that he wrote possibly for his magazine Adventure Coder. Beyond the Infinite was a graphic text adventure due for release from Channel 8 in September 1984 – though we discovered this as another unreleased title after searching for clues for the other missing Channel 8 games – Midwinter and After the Fire

Although due for release on a large number of platforms, no version seems to exist for any system. The game is believed to have been developed by Brian Howarth using Scott Adams’ parser.

Was it ever finished and can anything of it be found?

Thanks to contributor Chris Hester, who flagged up an old piece that he wrote possibly for his magazine Adventure Coder. Midwinter was a graphic text adventure due for release from Channel 8 in September 1984.

Although due for release on a large number of platforms, no version seems to exist for any system. The game is believed to have been developed by Brian Howarth using Scott Adams’ parser.

Brian confirmed to the CASA team in 2013 the following:

“I came up with this title, along with any advertising synopsis associated, but never got any traction on the project – so it never came to fruition”

So sadly, there is nothing to find of the game to show. Early on as a result, it is a case closed.

Thanks to contributor Chris Hester, who flagged up an old piece that he wrote possibly for his magazine Adventure Coder. After the Fire was a graphic text adventure due for release from Channel 8 in September 1984.

Although due for release on a large number of platforms, no version seems to exist for any system. The game is believed to have been developed by Brian Howarth using Scott Adams’ parser.

Brian confirmed to the CASA team in 2013 the following:

“I came up with this title, along with any advertising synopsis associated, but never got any traction on the project – so it never came to fruition”

So sadly, there is nothing to find of the game to show. Early on as a result, it is a case closed.

Thanks to contributor Chris Hester, who flagged up an old piece that he wrote possibly for his magazine Adventure Coder. The Wooden Box was a text adventure game due for release in 1986 by Anthony Collins, and was to be the sequel to Nythyhel.

No version seems to exist for any system, suggesting it may have been scrapped by the author.

Contributor Strident got in touch (see comments) to say that:

“Tony had reworked the C64/Amstrad/Spectrum adventure Nythyhel into a two-part ZX Spectrum PAWed adventure called Methyhel (later also a one-part 128K game). The games are very similar, but things like the names of the main characters, and their investigation agency, were tweaked. Tony planned to continue the Methyhel series with additional adventures, each focussing on a case of a different team member, before returning in the final game to take on Methyhel (Nythyhel) once again.

It’s possible that Tony might of used some of his ideas for the original Wooden Box sequel in one of these games, but when I was working with him on the second adventure in the series we had a different plot in mind. I still have correspondence and some draft ideas from this project; it’s possibly something I’ll look at producing in the future.”

So it seems there may not be anything to find for this title after all sadly.

Thanks to contributor Chris Hester, who flagged up an old piece that he wrote possibly for his magazine Adventure Coder. Teacher Trouble was a text adventure game due for release in 1986 by Anthony Collins, author of Nythyhel and various other games.

Although a ZX Spectrum version exists, the C64 version is still at large. Was it even actually ever started as a conversion?

Strident (see comments) suggests that Chris may have picked up details about this game from an Adventure Probe interview with Tony, where it was mentioned that he was to release Teacher Trouble for the C64 when the PAW system came out for the machine.

Unfortunately, Gilsoft only produced a Spectrum and CP/M version of that system – so that is likely why it never surfaced. As a resullt, it could well be a case closed already.