Games That Weren't^®

It’s always a shame when you come across a title which is still fairly recent, but seems to have just been left by the wayside.

Brickout is one such game, which when released back in 2007 in its preview form, won a lot of fans for whoever played it. It was a great conversion of a popular Android/PC game.

Overall it looks pretty complete, and not really needing a huge amount to finish it all off. Just what happened to the game and will it ever be finished?

We hope to find out from the developers very soon!

This is another game by the D-Lite guys, who seemed to knock a few unfinished games out during the early 90’s. Now add Boxes to the list.

I think this preview could well be broken – selecting different buildings gives the same thing and I can’t seem to do anything in the game. Do you know anything more about this game?

The preview comes with a promising title screen, but there seems to be litle else at this stage. What sort of game was it to be and what happened to it?

Bounch is a very simple maze game where you must guide a ball to the end, which constantly moves when you get started.

It’s sort of like a flat version of Codemaster’s Tilt game and its playable enough, but clear this is at the very early stages with little in the way of presentation.

A few levels exist, and then that is it – so either the programmer got bored or went onto pastures new. We hope to find out soon, with a coder name which we can try and get in touch with some day. Did anything more exist of it?

Martin got in touch and confirmed that he wrote the game when he was just 14, and probably got spread via disk swapping at the time via snail mail. The game was inspired by The Bubble Tale by Crest and was just done for fun overall.

Martin suggests he may well finish it some day! Case closed!

A simple and early vertically scrolling game from an unknown period, and which has surfaced from an unknown source it seems.

It’s a very early stage game and there doesn’t seem to be a trace of who was behind the work. It is just part of a simple map with some random sprites thrown over the top.

The name is likely to have been made up by the cracking crew, so it may be very difficult to establish who was behind this game and what the real intentions were.

Do you know any more about this game?

We’re not entirely sure if this game was done for the intention of selling, it’s still early days to know.

The content of this text adventure suggests it was done as a bit of fun.

This game seems to have been floating around for many years and has been digitally preserved, coded by someone calling themselves Boba Fette – who was part of a number of groups in the mid to late 80’s. This was one of Boba Fette’s only bits of code, before he later went onto the Amiga platform.

He’s based in the US and has updated his CSDB profile in recent years, so we hope to hear more soon and find out what happened to this game!

The Attack of the Blue Bomber is a great little game – a clone of Fort Apocalypse and Airwolf by Elite. You must navigate your blue helicopter through a series of tight caverns, avoiding lasers and fired missiles.

You must also shoot your way through parts of the background to progress and shoot little question mark icons to get bonus points. The start screen suggests there could be a number of levels, though I didn’t have chance to play fully all the way through.

It seems odd that this preview didn’t seem to be completed, or was the game ever actually complete?

Well, thanks to an anonymous contributor (thanks!), we learn that the creator was Canadian and has a page that talks a little about the game here: http://wandel.ca/homepage/computers.html   Markus Wandel had the following to say:

“I wanted to be a programmer just as good as the pros, and because most of the professional product we saw was video games, and because one of the better ones was “Fort Apocalypse” I just had to write my own smooth scrolling helicopter-in-a-dungeon game.

Looking back at it now it is unimaginative but it plays OK, click on the image to download a disk image to try it on an emulator. The only thing missing is the second half of the third level, the dungeon simply ends and you fly out into black nothingness. If anyone cares, the source code and the cobbled-together tools used to make this game are all on the disk image too.”

We have grabbed a copy of the game from Markus’ site and added to the archives here, which includes the source code if anyone wants to play around with the game. Markus also had some disk images with his utilities and other works, which we’ve also added here. It is clear that it was never properly released or finished, so this is very much a case closed!

Another title which was found on the disks of Cory Kin, but we believe this was a demo downloaded from Compunet at some point.

Upon loading up the game, it doesn’t look like much – but you can move around a character which moves around in all directions across a small map with some kind of overhead housing area.

You can’t do much apart from move around the map, so was this just a test of some kind? Or was there a fully fledged game to come out of the demo?

We don’t know sadly who was behind the game, but hopefully they will find this page by pure chance and let us know. Or maybe you’ve seen this before?

More research needed for this one, but check out the preview for now…