Games That Weren't^®

A surprise entry into the GTW64 archives thanks to the work of Fix, Bieno, Pugsy, Jazzcat

Single Extreme Freedom was to be a strategic game developed by Alice Software Studio from between 1992 and 1994. It featured action and interactive fiction using a turn-based engine for two players where you play the King of Soregno and Saratosa in a fight against each other. Most of the game’s description comes thanks to the game’s creator – Tamás Tarnóczky.

In the game itself, the screen is divided into portions, which can be scrolled from right to left – the map; the hot spots of the events mentioned above are also bearing the name of their fictitious cities and ports. Between these lands, the players can move troops and ammunition, which can be traded, or navigate ships in the coastal area between.

Throughout the game, there are various distractions which sometimes require the player to read a newspaper, or to bear children during that time. One aspect is that if you don’t have a child and if a king dies without an heir, then the game is over. There are three different periods in the kingdom’s history and each has its own text handler, players can also choose the destination at the beginning of the game and other conditions.

The developer describes a slightly unusual (and, as such, is perhaps unique) feature: one of the four-page sheets fills out as a text adventure game. A sort of “playing the game” type thing that is a side mission compared to the main game. The text adventure mission is to incite a rebellion to demoralise and finally take a city of your enemy (which can be found in the main menu in the “Market” and then “Rebellion”.

Surprisingly, Single Extreme Freedom was actually completed – but sadly was never to be published and released. It only required testing it seems, which is a huge shame – as the game would have appealed to quite a few.

Well, now the game has been saved from obscurity and can now be released to the world for the first time. Not just a promising preview, but a complete game for all to check out. We hope to maybe learn more about the game’s development sometime soon!

But for now… enjoy!

A small entry into GTW for a title which we have managed to preserve thanks to the kind loan from collector Havar B. Hojem.

This was a title spotted in Havar’s personal collection which had a home-made inlay produced. Curious to what the game was, we were loaned the title and at first couldn’t get anything to load.

It was realized that the files saved on the tape were Game Creator (Mirrorsoft) files saved directly, which must be loaded into the tool and could not be loaded in separately. After that realization, the game loaded fine and we were presented with a simple Jaws themed game where you actually control a shark that must eat people.

With huge thanks, Richard Bayliss has very kindly packaged up the game so that it can run independantly from the editor. Richard has added a quick title screen with instructions and compressed the files. Thanks Richard! We have also included the raw files if you want to check them out.

It is very simplistic and only worth a quick play, but then all Game Creator titles are like that. It’s certainly one of the better efforts made in the tool.

Sadly we don’t know anything about who created the game. Clearly it seems to be a title which was done for personal enjoyment, and at best may have been shared with a few friends. But there is a distinct lack of credits which means we cannot re-unite game with author (who no doubt have long forgotten about the title they possibly created as a kid). Havar brought the game in a bundle, where the tapes were owned by the seller’s uncle. We hope that Havar may recall the contact details of the person in particular so we can do some digging.

By putting up the game on GTW64, we hope that some day the author may by chance put in a search for their game and get a pleasant surprise! :)

This interesting dual scrolling title was written by the brother (?) of musician Nigel Grieve, but didn’t seem to have any company attached to it.  Was it intended for Hewson maybe?

Well, thanks to contributor Gaetano Chiummo, it has been discovered that the game was reviewed in Italian magazine MC Microcomputer issue 65 and was to be newly distributed by a company called Italvideo.  In the review the publisher is listed as Italvideo/Ocean.

Interestingly, Kevin Grieve worked on V – The Computer Game, Knight Rider and Super Bowl for Ocean Software a year before, so was Zolo indeed pitched to Ocean from Kevin? It does seem indeed that there is a certain connection, which only Kevin might be able to reveal. We hope also that Grant Harrison may know more too, as he worked with Kevin a number of times.

The game is a little rough round the edges, but has a nicely animated ship and the tunes are OK by Nigel.

We suspected that the Italvideo link may have been a pirate label, as there were quite a few Italian pirated tapes sold of common commercial titles from the UK, but then Zolo had retained its name. Certainly it was pirated and released under the name of Sistema 2001 by Game 2000.

Thanks to Stadium64, he directed us to a page on the Retrocollector website which shows that this was a limited Ocean connected release in Italy via Italvideo. Just why Ocean didn’t release the game in some form in the UK, we are not quite sure yet. But this indeed was released somewhere.

So there seems to be more of a story to dig out with this one.