Games That Weren't^®

Not likely to have been anything official, someone took it on themselves to try and do a conversion of the PC football simulator of the same name and seemed to have a good crack of it.

There seems to be plenty of game mechanics in place, so our guess is that the game stalled due to real life commitments.

With a coder credit, we hope to find out more about the game and what the plans were exactly for it.

Watch this space!

Have a guess what this game is about.

As no doubt you will have guessed (and no, there isn’t a prize!) it is another match the pairs game – which was a pretty popular thing on the C64 back in the mid to late 90’s.

This seems ok enough, though rather than using joystick you have to use keys to match pairs, which is pretty clunky.

Did it get any further? We’re not sure. It seems fairly complete at this stage, so maybe this was it?

An unofficial conversion of the popular PC game, and one which was looking very impressive when the preview was released back in 2006.

Unfortunately though it looked as if the project stalled, but thankfully it seems that the game is back on track and is due for release hopefully very soon:

http://www.indieretronews.com/2019/11/eye-of-beholder-c64-this-upcoming.html

Hopefully case closed and a happy ending too? Well, yes … In November 2022 the game was finally released! 

Enjoy and indeed case closed!

Sadly I couldn’t get this one to run in Vice, so i’ve borrowed the screenshot from Gamebase 64 for now.

I’m not entirely sure what the game is about, but it seems to be a single screen isometric puzzler which may have a level or two.

It is possible that many companies felt it was a too complex a title for them to release and were scared off.

With no credits, this could be a tough one to find out what happened.

A neat looking Dungeons and Dragons style game from 1993 is our next title, just simply called Dungeons.

There is not a huge amount of interaction apart from a bit of moving around, so again as with many previews in GTW64, its early days.

We have a code credit of sorts, so can we find anything more about the game and why it never got much further?

A bit harsh I know, but Dump couldn’t be more apt a name for a game which doesn’t really do anything at all.

There is a simple logo screen to kick things off, followed by a static screen and some flying objects. No real interaction and no real gameplay to report.

Was the game dumped? One for the coder if we can ever find them.

Yet another early preview and not a huge amount going on at this stage.

Here you control a simple ghost like sprite which must collect a key from a room with blue blobs and get to a gate at the other side. It’s pretty hard going, and getting the key and going to the door does nothing anyway.

Did the coder get bored early on? Was it a fake game to get some cheap points for a crack?

A very simple single screen shooter which is in its early days, even if it does seem to have a lot of spit and polish making it up.

There is very little to do apart from move your craft and nothing to really shoot to kill.

We guess that the coder got bored and moved on pretty quickly. Do you know anything more about it?

Unfortunately not a massive amount can be really said about this game at this very early stage.

Although looking very pretty with a cool star effect, there isn’t really anything playable to see. There seems to be a kind of object coming out of the star field, but it doesn’t really do anything.

Is this some kind of space exploration game? Was it to be a shooter of some kind? We’re not sure.

Check out the preview for now, but maybe there is something more to discover about this game?

Unfortunately there isn’t too much I can say about this game at this stage, due to it being all in Polish it seems. Thankfully, Havoc Crow via the comments has been on-hand to shed a bit of light.

The game borrows character graphics from Aliens, and has a basic interface to do some kind of interaction with the characters, but this is as about as far as I get.

It seems to still be very early days for the game, so we guess the developer just moved onto other projects and left this one to gather dust. With a developer lead though, we hope to find out soon what happened to this game.

However, Havoc Crow suggests that the game could well have been on sale at somepoint in Poland, as the magazine “Top Secret” in its December 1994 issue had a reader submitted guide and map (see scans). So it seems the game did find its way into at least one person’s hands and the guide implies that the game was finished enough to have an actual ending.

Havoc Crow described the game on MobyGames back in 2007 as follows:

“Cyberworm is an uncomplicated adventure game, where you take control of a cyborg sent to infiltrate a company and retrieve some documents. There are several maze-like levels to traverse. You move around them, trying to find necessary items and locate the exit. There are guards in some rooms who may very well kill you.

There are almost no graphics – all you get are exits written on the screen. The interface is limited to the buttons in the bottom-left corner and your face in the top-right corner.”

Thanks to Havoc Crow, we’ve added a translation from them of the CYBERWORM article that featured in Top Secret.

Also thanks to Mariusz Mlynski, we learn the following:

“The article in Top Secret was written by my brother, who used the nickname “M&M’S” at the time. Fun fact: he was rewarded with a one-year magazine subscription and a fancy book about the history of IBM for his submission :)

About the game: it was made by Robert Bieńkowski (Tocont Cracking Service) and released by Fiction Software, a friend of Robert. I’m not aware that it was ever “on sale” in the traditional sense, i.e. as an individual game with its own cover, although I can’t completely rule it out. Fiction Software was one of the most prolific import groups in Poland, selling tape compilations of foreign cracks with their intro slapped on the front.

That’s how my brother and I got our hands on Cyberworm: we found it on one of the many tape compilations of cracked games. That was before any intellectual property laws were enacted in Poland, so one could buy those legally in computer shops or flea markets, no one cared in the emerging wild west :) What is certain is that the game was spread in Poland, is in a complete state and can be finished, so the “Preview” status isn’t really accurate. I think it was a mistake of Gamebase64 to label it as a preview.”

If you know anything more, please do get in touch!