Games That Weren't^®

In the early 80’s, the Dutch games scene for the C64 was blessed by the coding talents of a guy called John Vanderaart – who was pretty prolific! Outside of Holland, sadly we didn’t get to see many titles – but did get to see Eindeloos and Hopeless released by Ariolasoft.

Back in Holland, John was most famous for his Dutch text-adventures (with “De Sekte” being probably his best known). He stopped programming on the C64 back around 1987/88 and left the game development scene pretty much soon after. Sadly he doesn’t like to talk much about the old days (a sadly familiar tale with many!)

One of the very last games that John produced was a title called Aurum in 1987, which was a large adventure based on one of his first adventure games “Steen der Wijzen” (Magic Stone). It was reviewed in a dutch computer magazine at the time, but has been the subject of a large scale search for many years. Rumors spread that the game may not exist at all!

It is a huge shame, as the game itself sounded pretty superb with some great graphics throughout. Is it one that can ever be saved?

Well, after months of work – the collaborated efforts of Paul Koller, Ralph Egas, Fix, Pugsy, Enthusi, Jazzcat and Scout have seen Aurum miraculously saved from obscurity. It is by pure chance that the game was preserved thanks to the efforts of Paul…

“Somewhere in the beginning of 2014, I again did an internet search for Aurum and Vanderaart and actually found a hit from an old newsgroup from 1999 from a guy who actually claimed he owned this game!

I looked him up on Facebook and contacted him. Ralph Egas is also a big C64-fan and I actually visited him yesterday talking about all kinds of C64 stuff. And indeed, he owns a copy of Aurum. Well, his copy was actually “copied” at a Dutch audio-visual conference “Firato” in the 80s, where a friend of his (Conno van Wijk) met John Vanderaart.

While talking to him, John said he was getting a drink and Conno was allowed to look through his personal disk-collection. And there Aurum was “secretly” copied. Conno and a friend put a VERY simple intro in front and also “tagged” the original title screen as a kind of joke (no real scener apparently :) ).

This version was given to Ralph who copied it to a d64 file and sent it to me yesterday and I played it today for the 1st time. It’s a really nicely put together adventure, although not very useful if you don’t know Dutch :)”

The game was passed over for fixing and translation, and finally the game is now ready to be shown to the world. Originally intended for release by Radarsoft – just why it never got released is a mystery. But check it out finally for yourself!

Case closed!

We are slightly cheating with this entry, but this is for a collection of games written by Duncan Kershaw way before his Players Software days.

They are all written in BASIC, and are some of the earliest examples of Duncan’s work on the C64 which were intended for his Electra Software, where games were shared only to friends.

Duncan has been busy preserving all of his disks and tapes, and the following 3 titles have come from some of his recent tape archival work (including managing to save Space Hop!):

• Quest 64!
• Crystal Kingdom
• Hunchy

Both Quest 64! and Crystal Kingdom are two BASIC text adventure games which were written in 1984. Hunchy was as you may guess a Hunchback clone.

Quest 64! and Hunchy are rather special – as they are two of the first games that Duncan ever produced. Duncan recalls Quest 64 as follows … “Neither games we’re ever released, but they both hold good memories for me. Quest is the reason I got into the games industry… I swapped the cassette for The Hobbit and got a call from a mates Mum asking for help… That was it, I was going to be a coder…”

Duncan managed to get two of the games originally off his tapes via the WAV to PRG method, but Quest 64! proved troublesome. Luigi Di Fraia however came to the rescue and helped Duncan to save his very first game, managing to help salvage the title from obscurity.

So for the first time, here are some of Duncan’s first ever games ready to be seen for the first time in 30 years! Enjoy!

Our next entry is a quick one as highlighted by contributor Sean O’Neill. It’s a title we’ve been aware of for some time, but just haven’t got round to adding it to the site.

The game should have been released by Mirrorsoft back in late 1985, and was reviewed by both Your Commodore and Zzap 64. However, the game doesn’t seem to have yet surfaced, begging the question of whether the game was ever actually released properly.

Thanks to Martin Smith, we learn that there were six Mr Men games planned for release – and this was to be the second. Three were released for the Spectrum – First Steps With, Here and There and Word Games With. Hi Bouncer was unreleased for the Spectrum (although was released on the C64) while two others are also actually missing (Mr Men Magic Storymaker and, aptly enough, The Invisible Mr Men). First Steps was developed for both Spectrum and C64 by Primer Software – David Janda and Steve Mercer are credited for its Spectrum version. Will either of those groups know what happened to this game and maybe the other two? (which we assume were never started).

Well, David Janda contacted us to confirm that he did the Spectrum version, but this was a conversion of the C64 game – which you can see in the game comments below. So the credits can be crossed off!

With the game actually reviewed, and with screenshots – the suggestion is that it was – but only in limited numbers. For more details on the game, check out the review scans and article details (borrowed from gamebase64.com)

Many thanks to Paul Dennison, who very kindly posted his original disk version to us to fully preserve, so you can now play what was a released game in the end. It’s not much to write home about, but great to see a piece of history preserved.

By pure co-incidence, Genesis Project had also preserved the game at the same time and have released a tidied up version earlier in the day, which you can also download from within the zip file. They have also very kindly provided the TAP backup that was made from the original tape game. The zip file contains the original disk image, and the cracked version with documentation. The TAP file is separate.

Case closed!