Games That Weren't^®

A surprise finding on the disks of Darren Melbourne, with an unofficial and early Mario game from 1983 which has been lost for some time!

At the moment , we do not know for sure if this game actually got released – but Jeremy Thorne’s other game – Mario’s Brewery was released in 1983, without official Nintendo endorsement.

Thanks to a blog post here, we learn from the comments that Jeremy was just 14 when he wrote the game, and was part of a series of three titles, including Mario’s Brewery and Pubjumper Mario. They were written for 4K cartridges, hence were very simple affairs!

Firefighter Mario is a Vanguard clone, with Mario in a firetruck – having to put out fireball enemies, and then destroy a large flame on top of a building. The game scrolls in a variety of directions, just like Vanguard. It’s not the best game in the world, but for 1983 and 4K, you cannot really complain!

Hopefully Jeremy will get in touch some day – sadly Pubjumper Mario is still missing, but at least one more of the trio is now safe!

Thanks to contributor Aki Sivula, we learnt about a recently recovered game by a chap called Pasi Hytonen – who after starting off by developing games for the Oric, before then moving onto the C64.

His first project was a neat platformer called Little Knight Arthur, which was produced in his spare time whilst at high school. The game was developed from between 1985 and 86, and could well have been a commercial release.

Sadly Pasi never released the game to anyone, but he went on to do games such as Uuno Turhapuro muuttaa maalle for Amersoft and Number Bumper.

It wasn’t until November 2015, that Pasi had help preserving the game. The game has now been released in early 2016 for all of you to see for the first time.

It’s a rock hard game, but a lot of fun – and its a shame it never got a full audience back in the day. But the main thing is that it is safe now, and many of you will get the chance to enjoy Pasi’s work.

For the full and excellent story about Pasi’s early work and how the game came about, check out his blog post here and more details about the release here.

Our next game in the archives is an early title from Video Images, who did Exceleron for Commodore User magazine back in the day.

It was a title that would make use of the SEUCK engine, which some companies back then decided was a good idea to make a quick game to release. The game was created by David Bradley and Dean Hickingbottom in 1988 and was to be released as a budget title.

Although the game was developed fairly rapidly, things hit a snag when the team found that the player would get stuck all the time on the map. It wasn’t the usual bug of appearing on a piece of play area that you were not able to move, but down to the map design leading to dead ends. They decided to put one life in the game to get around it, but it didn’t really work.

Sadly the game was abandoned due to the above issues, and was laid to rest on an old disk. That is – until 2015 anyway, when Dean Hickingbottom made some copies of some disks which included the full final version of this game. On another disk was the loading screen that was never used, which we have included here in Koala format.

In December 2015, Richard Bayliss very kindly took up the project of linking the loading screen in and tidying up the game destroying bugs on the map. Once these were fixed, the lives were increased back to their usual amount. A new title tune and colour bars have been added too. There is also a tape edition, which gives a close indication of how it may have been had it been released by someone like Power House or similar at the time.

So thanks to the great efforts of Richard, here is the game how it should have been!

Case closed!