Games That Weren't^®

We’re not entirely sure if a C64 conversion was ever in the works, but after the recent revelation that a C64 conversion of another Broderbund classic actually existed, then we are willing to believe that Ancient Art of War had a C64 conversion in production.

Thanks to contributor Luca Bertoldi, a snippet of news regarding the game was given in an issue of Zzap Italia in 1989. No other evidence has surfaced regarding a conversion of this popular war game.

So was anything ever started? Or was the Zzap news snippet a red herring? Considering that an Amstrad CPC edition did surface, then it is very much a possibility!

Do you know any more?

A very short entry for a title mentioned by Paul Rogers as being in production.

This was a 4 player platform game with parallax scrolling – unfortunately not getting any further than 25% complete.

The concept according to Paul looked very cool though and had a heck of a lot of promise.

At present, Paul is trying to dig out remains of the game and may offer the source code up for anyone who may want to finish it.

More soon we hope!

Forumites on Lemon 64 were happily surprised on the 4th August 2014, when the developer of a long lost adventure game of Scooby Doo was recovered and uploaded for the first time in over 20 years, after being recovered from disks in his basement.

Along with Scooby Doo, we learn that Microillusions had a series of titles due for release. Microillusions had struck up a deal with Hanna-Barbera for a series of their licences including Jonny Quest, Flintstones, The Jetsons and Scooby Doo across the Amiga, PC and C64 – possibly sharing the same engine to get all the titles out there quickly.

Microillusions made a terrible error though as they released The Jetsons to the world on the Amiga platform. They had shipped a Jetsons comic book serving as instructions with the game story background, which seemed like a great idea at the time. However, Hanna-Barbera never approved the title and were furious with Microillusions for releasing it. They revoked all their licences and this damaged Microillusions terribly – eventually contributing to them going bankrupt. As a result, most of the games never saw the light of day either.

VP of product development, Sean B. Barger explained via the comments that the other main detail was that the CEO’s father took over the business and would not pay the quarterly minimum for the Hanna Barbera licences. Although HB were no doubt angry at the comic book release, this was the real reason why all the games were cancelled.

What is surprising, is that according to Peter Ward (coder of C64 Scooby Doo) – most of the games were actually pretty much complete – so there is actually a series of titles like this one to still recover!

Thanks to a Microillusions article, we learn that The Flintstones was to be displayed and played out via a TV screen – so it viewed like an interactive cartoon where you could point and click to interact with characters and move around. The game was actually reviewed for the PC, but wasn’t released on that platform either by the looks of it. Commodore 64 was mentioned as a target platform, along with some potential credits!

After the amazing recovery of Scooby Doo, we are very hopeful that the other titles could follow soon. Watch this space!

Forumites on Lemon 64 were happily surprised on the 4th August 2014, when the developer of a long lost adventure game of Scooby Doo was recovered and uploaded for the first time in over 20 years, after being recovered from disks in his basement.

Along with Scooby Doo, we learn that Microillusions had a series of titles due for release. Microillusions had struck up a deal with Hanna-Barbera for a series of their licences including Jonny Quest, Flintstones, The Jetsons and Scooby Doo across the Amiga, PC and C64 – possibly sharing the same engine to get all the titles out there quickly.

Microillusions made a terrible error though as they released The Jetsons to the world on the Amiga platform. They had shipped a Jetsons comic book serving as instructions with the game story background, which seemed like a great idea at the time. However, Hanna-Barbera never approved the title and were furious with Microillusions for releasing it. They revoked all their licences and this damaged Microillusions terribly – eventually contributing to them going bankrupt. As a result, most of the games never saw the light of day either.

VP of product development, Sean B. Barger explained via the comments that the other main detail was that the CEO’s father took over the business and would not pay the quarterly minimum for the Hanna Barbera licences. Although HB were no doubt angry at the comic book release, this was the real reason why all the games were cancelled.

What is surprising, is that according to Peter Ward (coder of C64 Scooby Doo) – most of the games were actually pretty much complete – so there is actually a series of titles like this one to still recover!

The game was actually released on the Commodore Amiga, and you can see how the C64 version would have roughly been.  It was an interactive adventure game with a graphic and text window, and icons used to move around and interact. An article with Microillusions (see scans) confirms that a C64 version would have been underway and some possible credits.

After the amazing recovery of Scooby Doo, we are very hopeful that the other titles could follow soon. Watch this space!

A very short entry unfortunately for a title which we should have added a long time ago.

Aircat was a game to be developed by Canvas Software for an unknown publisher at the time. We believe it was some kind of aircraft game, but need confirmation.

The title is believed to have been abandoned when Canvas went under, and was to feature graphics by the late Martin Holland.

Do you know any more about this game?