Games That Weren't^®

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.

This preview certainly is a mystery, and we guess this was a working title for a game cracked by Russ Michaels from his Ironfist days.

This is a simple multi-directional scroller where you control a space ship within a maze. There is no interaction with any objects or anything to really do apart from explore the map.

We have no clues to who was behind the game and if it got any further than this. We expect that this was planned as a budget title of somekind.

Do you know anything more about it?

Our next title is a conversion of an obscure 1984 Spectrum game by John Prince called Mr Wong’s Loopy Laundry. Not an official conversion, and one done some 24 years later by Peter Vass.

The game seems pretty complete, but is lacking in a few areas and has a few bugs overall.

It seems like it has been abandoned completely and may never get completed fully. Peter may shed some light on it at some point i’m sure.

Also known as Moonstone – A hard days knight, this is an unofficial conversion of the Mindscape Amiga game, and a very good start too which has been made!

There are some cool introduction sequence screens, followed by some brief actions scenes which you can control. It all looked very promising when first released to the world back in 2005.

It was coder Michelangelo Carbonara’s first serious attempt at programming on the Commodore 64, and the game was unfortunately dropped when he realized it had to depend too much on graphics. At the time, he didn’t know any graphic artists and everything was ripped from the Amiga.

Will it ever get completed and see the light of day? Michelangelo says that it could someday be redeveloped, now that he has a solid friendship with graphic artist Raffox – so watch this space.

For now, Michelangelo has dug out another preview of the game which has a bit more interactivity on the menus. On the menu screen, you can select the number of players and then go to “Select Knights” (Practice option not available) and you can choose the colour and edit the name of the knights. After which you get a map where you can select an area. There is a fight with a boar if you just press fire on the map. Each of the 4 players takes turns, and when all players have walked, there is a screen with the moon that announces the coming of a new day.

We hope that the coder does decide to resurrect the game again some day – but for now, check out what could have been.

Another cool looking Dungeons and Dragons preview goes into the archives, this time one from Kopido games which seemed to run out steam.

In this preview, you can move around a little bit – but there is no real gameplay at this stage. It’s more of a proof of concept it seems!

Did it get much further than this? We doubt it, but hopefully we’ll get some credits soon and find out what really happened to this game.

Mission X is a cool looking sideways scrolling shooter with cool Uridium style backgrounds.

It’s a short map, as you start hitting random parts of the game’s code as it runs out of map to show, but its enough to give an indication of how this could have been.

There are no credits apart from sound, so it could be very hard to track anything down of this one. We’re hopeful though and hope to unearth something on the game very soon.

Watch this space!

Mini Don is a cool Don Doko Don conversion which was being done as part of a mini-game compo.

Although looking and playing brilliantly, the developer didn’t finish it as the graphics were too much to fit within 4K. It was originally thought that the game was never to be finished, but Geir confirmed that the game was just inspired by Don Doko Don, and was not intended to be a straight conversion.

He has said that it will never be finished as a Don Doko Don conversion, but it could well be finished as a different game. He still works on the game now and shots can be found here:

http://home.online.no/~gestrau/c64/minidon-screenshot-1.png

http://home.online.no/~gestrau/c64/minidon-screenshot-2.png

Geir still does C64 development and recently completed Brilliant Maze for the RGCD compo!

Created by the developer of Gemini Wing on the C64, this seems to be an advert for Carl Wade’s coding abilities that was leaked out.

the game is a sideways scroller with a nice scrolling background and a cool attack wave thrown over the top. It looks cool enough and could have been a good budget game had it been fleshed out with new sprites.

We guess that Carl got the job on Gemini Wing and that this was put to rest as a result.

Sadly we believe that Carl may have passed away in recent years, so finding out more about this game is very unlikely now. If you do happen to know anything about this game, please contact us.

We guess the Sega logo in the background was no link for this title, which is a simple single screen game where you shoot at Mafia lurking up in building windows.

There is little to do apart from this with your Op Wolf style gun target, and it seems to be another very early development which has been canned early on.

There are sadly no credits attached to the game, so there is some digging to be done to find anything out about it. Can you help shed any light?