Games That Weren't^®

Toms Revenge seems to be a sort of Load Runner clone (at least in terms of looks) where you must run up and down ladders to collect items.

The game has been written in BASIC, so its a little on the clunky and slow side – but its good for what it is.

For reasons unknown, the game was never properly finished and has been languising in preview state ever since.

What happened to the game? Only Michael Hartig will know…

This is the start of what seems to be an odd conversion of a title released on Amiga and PC – an icon driven graphic adventure game which was called “Telekommando II – The Return of the Telekommando”

Nothing is really present in the preview at all, so it seems this was abandoned very early on. It isn’t clear if this was an official conversion, or something done as a bit of a joke.

Contributor Professor Chaos went through the code, and found that the music was just ripped from a Vibrants demo, but hidden within the code was some music demo from a tune called “ingame_jingle“. Was this perhaps what was intended for the C64 conversion?

The crack intro states that the game was from “Art Department”, who was an advertising company that also did the Amiga and DOS editions of Telekommando 2, but only in German and to advertise German telecom. It seems odd that the C64 icons are in English.

Professor Chaos suggests that the only other Art Department game on the C64 was Karamalz Cup, but I’m not sure if actually they were only behind the Amiga edition of the game. If the team was part of Art Department, then perhaps they were to be involved on Telekommando 2 as well?

There was nothing else found in the game at all – the icons don’t do anything, there was no more graphics, text or anything else. If you know anything  at all about this conversion – please let us know.

A nice cool preview now with Super Bouncer, which is sort of a cross between Cauldron 1 and 2, with a bouncing ball that needs to bounce to the end of the map to progress.

There is one level in total of what seems to be a well polished preview.

Sadly it seems that nothing more of the game ever came to light, and it has been left gathering dust ever since.

We’re not sure if the game was intended for any particular label. We hope to get hold of the developers to find out the story behind this cool preview, but for now, check it out for yourself.

This may have just been something knocked up to score some cheap points, but then there was a Super Ball game released a year previously: http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=7559&d=18&h=0

Super Ball 2 just seems to be the same game, but turned on its side. There is no actual game though, and just a play field with a logo underneath.

Very early days it seems for the title, so hopefully the developers can elaborate a bit more about whether anything more was done.

A very bizarre name for a game which seems to be nothing to do with Captain Hook, and is just a vertical scroller where you have two ships that are scrolling upwards.

There isn’t much going on apart from a few sprites being thrown in, until it runs out map and then starts to show characters from memory.

It seems to be an early preview, so was it meant for any particular software house, or was this a piece of experimental code which got shelved early on?

Do you know anything more about it?

Stoned isn’t a game about drugs, but a puzzler which seems to be based on Columns. It’s again from that era when puzzlers were everywhere, but this one in particular was looking pretty polished.

It isn’t 100% playable at this stage, but there is enough here to want to see more of the game.

There are no developer credits at this stage, so some more digging around is required. Do you know anything more about the game?

We’re not sure exactly what you’re meant to do in Stone, so if anyone knows – please let us know.

We thought it was some kind of pairs game, but couldn’t get anything to happen. It might be that the game is just at a very early stage and isn’t actually playable yet.

It looks neat enough and could have joined a rather long list of puzzlers which were popular in the mid-late 90’s it seems.

Hopefully Achim will be able to shed some more light on the game at somepoint in the future.

Star Scaper is a promising preview, where you control a ship which can move left and right in Uridium style, but from a side-on based view point.

It seems you have to collect a series of items and progress through the level to get to further levels at this stage, whilst not bouncing into the background and losing energy.

Tectron is a relatively unknown developer, so who was behind the name? Did the game get any further than this and was it intended for anyone in particular?

Well, coder Tobias Erbsland got in touch in 2015 and confirmed that this game was actually part of a bigger game that was never finished. The larger game had no name, so we’ll keep this title for now, but it would have combined a series of mini-games into a big game logic. Tobias at the time experimented with new loader concepts that were used in Digital Talk magazine for swapping out modules.

Tobias mentioned that the special feature of the game was the really fast scrolling, where it does not use traditional scrolling techniques (where the screen content is moved), but instead it is rendered each time (allowing scrolling speeds exceeding 8 pixels).

It is hoped that more of the game can be saved at somepoint, but this could well be it!

Watch this space!

Squid is a cute little single screen preview which has some nice hi-res overlaid sprites which move around and which you must avoid.

The game isn’t fully playable and just allows you to jump around the map and interact with a few objects.

We know very little else about the game though, including who it was for and who it was being written by. It is possible that a version exists with more game mechanics and levels, but it could be tough trying to find any more of it.

There are two games with this odd name, and this one in particular is an earlier title which has you controlling a space ship that flies across a simple looking terrain.

There isn’t much else at this stage with the game, and the title from 1988 seems a lot more complete (even though its a completely different game)

The game like with the other named title from 1988 never got finished or released in a fuller form. The graphics artist got in touch and confirmed some credits, so we hope to learn more soon about the games. It is confirmed that both are by the same people.