Games That Weren't^®

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?

A very simple side way scrolling shooter which was apparently being done for Markt and Technik back in 1992.

Your fighter is fixed to the bottom of the screen and has no real interaction at this stage, but there are 3 levels still in the preview with different themes and music overall.

What happened to this game, and was there anything more playable than this? It is likely that the game was pitched to the company but it was rejected. We need to find out more!

Our next title is a simple minesweeper style game which was being done in the mid-late 90’s for an unknown source.

It’s a nice enough implementation, but nothing too special which hasn’t been seen before.

The likelihood is that the coder got bored and went onto pastures new, but with a coder name known, we hope to try and get to the bottom of what happeneed to this game. Do you know anything more about it?

An interesting start of what seems to be an interpretation of Duck Hunt on the C64.

It’s not badly done, though the target is a little slow and lethargic. But it looks promising overall, and would have maybe made a nice game with a light gun option.

We’re not sure of the intentions for the game, but guess it was just done for a bit of fun. Hopefully the coder will shed some more light soon.

This is a pretty neat looking game, where you control a prisoner who is trying to break out of prison. Here you must run along in a similar style to Rapid Fire and try and kill the guards who are trying to stop you.

In this preview, you cannot shoot anything and just get to the end of the map and let the time run out. It’s fairly simple, and we guess the coder just ran out of steam and canned the game as a result.

Did it progress with any more levels or was this it?

Thanks to Gaz Spence, we learn roughly of the credits thanks to an entry in CSDB. We’re not sure of the real names, but hope to find out soon to see if this preview ever got any further. If you know anything more, then please do get in touch.

Watch this space!

Yet another puzzler to add to the archives, this time something a little different where you must replicate the pattern on the right most box.

It’s pretty simple stuff, with some snazzy presentation at the bottom – it isn’t anything too special, but it would be good to find out what happened to the game and if it got any further than this.

We guess it didn’t, but lets find the coders and find out for sure.

Move Out is another tile based puzzler, though I couldn’t quite work out what you were meant to do. Anyone have any ideas?

Well, contributor Ken Knight found the following via the comments:

“The only thing I figured out as regards the game play is that you can horizontally move the blocks on the 2 lines designated with a 1. These become brighter and then can’t be shifted. Perhaps that’s as far as the programming went as I can’t get anything further to happen.”

The presentation and initial preview seems fairly promising, and we guess that the coder just got bored or moved onto pastures new.

We’re not sure if the game got any further, but with a developer’s name to check out, we hope to solve the mystery behind the game soon.