Games That Weren't^®

A brief entry once more, where a sequel to a cool early platform game (called Tronix would you believe!) was mentioned in the game’s scroll text.

Little more is known at this point in time – but it is very likely by the same developer. I’m not sure if the actual first game was released properly, or if it was an early form of homebrew.

Was anything started of the sequel, or was this it?

A quick entry for a graphical text adventure that was due out by Rihannon Software, where they were intending to put out an entire series of games with different themes by creators Elisabeth Stott and Lucy Ewell.

Two titles which managed to make it out were Jenny of the Prairie and Cave Girl Clair, but two other titles – Chelsea of the South Sea and Lauren of the 25th Century were not so lucky.

It is possible that they were released, but just in limited numbers. But we need more help to try and find them to ensure they are preserved.

Thanks to Fabrizio Bartoloni, we learn that the game was released at least on the Apple 2, and you can also play it online as well. This gives a good indication of what the C64 version would have been like. Can it be found?

A quick entry for a graphical text adventure that was due out by Rhiannon Software, where they were intending to put out an entire series of games with different themes by creators Elisabeth Stott and Lucy Ewell.

Two titles which managed to make it out were Jenny of the Prairie and Cave Girl Clair, but two other titles – Chelsea of the South Sea and Lauren of the 25th Century were not so lucky.

It is possible that they were released, but just in limited numbers. But we need more help to try and find them to ensure they are preserved.

Can you help?

Wildfire was a W.I.P title for a game in development at Starlight Software/Destiny. The game is not anything to do with the shooter we already have in GTW.

Could it have been a space shooter?… a puzzler?

Thanks to Max Mirni, we have found that the graphic artist was a guy called Harjinder Rai, who worked with Steve Dunn on Call Me Psycho. From a random forum post, Harjinder mentioned two developer names involved with the game called “Andy and Ian”. In late 2019, we found out thanks to Fabrizio Bartoloni and an interview carried out by Graeme Mason that “Andy” was Paul “Andrew” Stoddart and Ian was Ian Foster. See “Creator Speaks” to see Graeme’s question to Paul about CRL and where Wildfire is mentioned.

The game was to be a large scale development like Cyborg for CRL, but the company collapsed before it could be finished and released.

Francis Lee worked at Starlight briefly and recalled briefly about Wildfire. He suggested that the game was being developed under his Destiny Software label, but the quality of the graphics and overall game just didn’t seem good enough to take it to market. Francis let the project go in the end despite trying to support the project initially.

When backing up disks from Darren Melbourne in December 2015, we found a preview called Wildfire, which we believed to be an early preview of the very same game – but it wasn’t anything related to it at all.

We hope to find out more soon from Harjinder and Paul about the game in the future and see if anything can be recovered to put onto the website.

Not to be confused with the arcade, this was to be a sequel to the Ariolasoft game from 1986, and released on their British Software label.

This was mentioned in the inlay for the first game as coming soon, but never surfaced at all. It was most likely going to use the same engine, just with different maps.

It could likely be due to the name causing licencing issues, or even poor sales of the first game.

With no developer details known, this could be pretty tricky to find out more. Do you know anything about this game?

We all remember the superb Gaplus by Ash and Dave, which was very arcade like and did well in various magazines of the time.

You may be interested to learn that Gaplus was infact a rescue job by Ash and Dave, after a developer struggled initially to do a conversion at Binary Design. So it was handed over to them.

We don’t know much more than this at present, but out there is probably an early development version of Gaplus that wasn’t working too good. Who was it by and can we ever find out the full story some day?

For now, just play the actual released game – its great!

Thanks to The Bird Sanctuary for highlighting this attempt at an official conversion of Super Mario Bros.

This was to be a proper conversion, started in mid-1987 by Gary Liddon (code) and Gary Penn (graphics). They essentially recreated the entire first level on the C64, and trying to get as accurate as possible according to the C64’s limitations. Maybe Great Giana Sisters had inspired them?

Once complete, they began to show it around – and eventually Firebird took an interesti n the game. Colin Fuidge was very impressed with the work, and so contacted Nintendo to try and get a licence deal.

Everything went pear-shaped though when Nintendo made legal threats, and instructions were very clear – “Cease and Desist” and “Destroy everthing” – which both Gary’s apparently recall to this day.

So that was it – was the game actually completely destroyed? We are guessing so, as it no doubt would have surfaced by now like Tyger Tyger did. Would have been great to see how close it really was!