Games That Weren't^®

No doubt a working title, but Ah Type is pretty much as you would guess and is a clone of R-Type in very early stages. But even though it is early stages, what has been done so far is very clean and impressive.

We are treated to a very slick and fast interpretation of the game, which possibly shows a glimpse of how the official conversion could have been. It’s not got a lot to do, apart from fly your main ship over some of Level 1, and a brief attack wave – but its enough to show case the talents of Cory Kin.

The game was recently recovered from more disks which Cory shipped all the way from the US. It was developed during his Compunet days and was no doubt to send round companies to show what he was capable of.

There may have been more planned with the game, such as maybe a cheap budget title to copy off from the IREM arcade. We hope to hear more from Cory some day for his memories of the development and what his intentions were – its likely that it was just for self development purposes.

For now, check it out!

A short entry for a Badminton game which was being produced by Cory Kin during his early days of programming.

Nothing much was ever started apart from a small tech demo to show a scrolling playfield. The graphics are merely just test ones to start, but demonstrates an impressive scrolling routine. No company was contacted to release the game, and it was done just as a side project by Cory.

Unfortunately Cory lost interest in the development and went onto other titles instead. However, it seems the scrolling technique was made use of in other games such as Gem Quest and Indeflatable.

Check out a very small glimpse of a sport game which was never to be!

A quick entry for remains of a bouncy platformer game in very early stages and written by Cory Kin.

There was no name attached to the game, but upon executing we have a sprite which drops down from the top of the screen and seems to be able to scroll left and right and bounce from platform to platform. Certain platforms flash and can kill you if you land on them.

It seems there are no level maps intact, and it just happened that some character in memory helped to populate the level. We are hoping that Cory will recall something about the game.

We did wonder if this was actually Pet Rescue in an early form, but trying to embed some of the graphics that we found didn’t quite fit, so we believe it is something else.

Feel free to check it out for now!

Yet another title from the brilliant Cory Kin, and this time a very impressive vertically scrolling shoot-em-up, with some lovely graphics and attack waves.

It’s still early days and a relatively short map, but there is enough here to show case Cory’s talents, which no doubt he was trying to do with this game. This demo was found on a disk with a number of other executables which we believe Cory sent out to companies to try and get employment.

We don’t believe that this game got any further than this unfortunately, which is a massive shame – as the title does clearly have a lot of promise. Sadly it isn’t a title which can be picked up by anyone, as we didn’t find any source code for the game.

A cool glimpse at a rather neat title – hopefully we’ll hear more from Cory about the game very soon.

A working title of course, labelled on the disk as “When Uridium”, and called “When Uridium was famous” – this is a short game demo show casing a Uridium type game with very smooth and fast scrolling.

This was the work of Cory Kin yet again, and was most likely started and touted to game companies to try and get work.

We haven’t found any evidence to suggest that this clone got any further than the tech demo – which is a shame, as this feels like it could have been more than a match for the original game.

Hopefully at some point soon, Cory will shed some light on the game and if there is any more story behind the title. Watch this space!

Xytris is a really strange puzzler, which isn’t a tetris puzzler like you may think from the name, but a title where you must re-create the character from the box on the right side of the screen.

There are two sets of boxes, suggesting that it was a 2 player competition game where you must see who completes the stage first.

It’s fairly simple, and we guess that the programmer just lost interest in the title at the time. We wonder if there was intention for the game to be released on a magazine cover or something like that?

Do you know anything more about it?