Games That Weren't^®

Sky-Jack is an odd platformer game, where at this early stage the player actually glides around, rather than jumps.

I guess the preview was just to test some of the map and sprite mechanics, but little else at this stage. It looks promising enough.

Was anything more done on the game, maybe for a company or just for fun? Being in 1988, it is very possible that this was being done to actually sell.

Do you know anything more about it?

Sector seems to be a very early stage puzzle shuffle game which was left to rot for reasons unknown.

It looks colourful and well designed enough, but it’s an idea which has been seen many times over already. Did the developer feel the same at the time?

With no developer credits, this is going to be a tough one to find out more about. Maybe you know something about the game?

Nothing really much to say about this title – it has some nice titles and a bit of a preview to show, but very little interaction.

The demo just has a ship that you can move over a scrolling background, but that is it. Seems to be another game from the D-Lite/Art studios which never amounted to anything.

Can Kim shed some light on this title?

Very aptly named is our next entry, known only as Prototype. It even comes with its own proper logo, so it wasn’t a working title either.

And the preview is very much a prototype, with not a huge amount to do at this stage. Here you just control a walker style droid who has to be guided to an exit on the end of a map. Even when you get to the exit, it does nothing at this stage.

It has been confirmed that the game was released in 1990 in its current state by a group called The Lost Boys. So it could have been that the coder just moved onto pastures new. Hopefully we will find out soon if that was the case.

This early C64 game is a very promising sort of Xevious clone with futuristic backgrounds. It’s very glitchy in places, but it seemed to be shaping up nicely at the time.

We guess that the game got leaked out, and this could well have prevented the final game from being completed. Hopefully Kristian will confirm the details about his game in good time.

The game would have no doubt made a good budget title, maybe even a full pricer if more polish was added to it.

Do you know anything more about the game?

Project Sparkk is a small screen scrolling “navigate your ship through tight tunnels” style of game which was being developed in early 1988 and was no doubt for a software company of the time (though there is no suggestion of who this may have been).

Marc Francois was on music duties, but possibly just unofficially with them borrowing his tunes to use in the game (we’ll need to confirm).

The preview is pretty promising at this early stage, but is nothing that we haven’t already seen before.

Did the programmer get bored with the development or did something else just come along instead to take up their time? More research needed!

No doubt this isn’t the proper title of the game, but then it may not have had a name at all, as this was reported to have been coded in a day.

It looks impressive for what it is, even though there isn’t a lot going on.

It is sort of a Suicide Express clone with a car instead of a train, and is likely it would have had winding roads to replace winding train tracks.

It is possible that more code was done after the release of this preview, but with nothing else surfacing after all this time, we guess this died pretty much right after the preview was released.

Hopefully Arno can confirm in time!

Where did this game come from? It’s been around for about 30 years now, but it remained something of a mystery.

This seemed to be an unofficial home conversion based on the 60’s film Fantastic Voyage. This German language game comes with a full introduction sequence, where you get shrunk down into a small microscopic size and have to fly through the human body, past blood cells.

We think this is all there is to the game at this stage, but no doubt there would have been different types of levels as you progressed. For a game shaping up well like this, why was it abandoned? Hopefully Torsten will confirm details some day.

However, it was by pure chance that when speaking to coder Ritchie Brannan about another Fantastic Voyage game, that he recognized the graphics as being from his very own development that came about a year later.

It seems that this very game was intended for release by Ariolasoft, but for reasons unknown was dropped and Ritchie was given the project. He had no knowledge of this version at all.

It’s early days, but some decent leads at last on this title.

Another Dungeons and Dragon style game from an unknown source, which seems fairly good at this early stage, with a bit of movement – but little else of note at this stage.

Author Todd Elliott got in touch with GTW via the comments to say the following:

“Initially, I wanted to create a Dungeon Maker or something like that. I wanted to create an utility where I could create dungeons, maps, walls, monsters, story, etc.

While I initially created a dungeon mock-up you see here, I realized that I was way too ambitious for my taste! It was consuming too much of my time. I even wrote about it a little in C=Hacking #13 – “Hacking Graphics’.

Anyway, life happened. I moved back to my hometown and had to start all over from scratch. The early aughts were a difficult time. I boxed up my CBM & CMD stuff up in storage. I still have the cc65 code printouts.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have reverse-engineered a dungeon crawler, and maybe created some new games from that codebase. It would have been easier and faster. Thank you for the write up. Brought up great memories.”

So there we have it. Nothing more was ever done on the game, and life had got in the way to see the game finished. Hopefully some day Todd may decide to return to the project, but for now – check out the promise of what could have been and also the articles and demo that Todd created.

Case closed!

On Table is a very simple looking Pacman clone from 1997 where you control a strange spaceship style sprite over a shaded background.

It has some functional graphics, and a nice tune (which starts off sounding like Supremacy with its instruments!) – and you can collect some dots before the game ends. No enemies or anything just yet.

The end screen promises more in the full game, but this just didn’t seem to happen. Was this preview as far as it got, or did the team manage to get more going?