Games That Weren't^®

A very quick entry to confirm a title which was on the rumour list for sometime for the C64GS.

Thanks to coder Neil Harding, we can confirm that there was to be an improved cartridge edition of The Spy Who Loved Me by Domark.

The game would feature all the sections, including the submarine section where you could hold your gun at a fixed point and keep firing at enemies (who would somersault over the position you were shooting at). The gun would sweep left and right.

We are not sure why the game never actually surfaced, but its believed that Domark saw that the C64GS wasn’t doing well and decided to scrap it. Another theory is that they couldn’t get multi-load titles converted over sensibly.

We hope to hear more from Neil himself, so watch this space!

A very quick entry thanks to Kevin Oxland, who informs us that he was working on a version of Anarchy on the Commodore 64 for Psygnosis. This was being done by the development team, WJS.

However, after pretty much completing the conversion – Psygnosis decided to only release the game on the Amiga and ST, and the game was shelved.

We are hoping to hear more soon from Kevin about the conversion, but sadly already we know that nothing has survived of Kevin’s own disks. It could be a very tough one to find!

Do you know anything more about this conversion?

A very quick placeholder entry for another surprise V1 entry. This time in the shape of Toki!

Toki of course was eventually released on the C64, with a superb conversion by Al Dukes that was released onto cartridge.

Rather surprisingly, the Ocean History book shed some light in Bill Harbison’s write up that he had worked on a conversion with John Meegan which was cancelled. Had it been completed, it could have been Bill’s first and only piece of C64 work to our knowledge (unless you count his converted Spectrum graphics for Chase HQ!)

However, we have just clarified with John and Bill that there was no earlier edition of the game in production, and Bill’s graphics were used in the final release. So this page will eventually be deleted as a result.

Case closed!

Yet another early version of a popular game goes into the GTW64 archives, this time with Yie Ar Kung Fu – which was a favourite of mine by David Collier.

However, recently in the Ocean History book – we learn from Brian Beuken that he originally was handling all of the 8-bit conversions of Yie Ar Kung Fu, and got someone in to do the C64 version originally.

Although the Spectrum and Amstrad versions came along really well, the C64 version struggled due to the coder struggling to grasp how to get sprite multiplexing working. As a result, Ocean saw that the C64 one wasn’t working out – so they brought the game in house and got David to do it instead.

Unfortunately Brian couldn’t recall who the programmer was exactly, but confirms that the game never got much beyond a background and a few sprites due to not being able to get the multiplexer working. Brian had contributed what art he could at that point, based on the Amstrad sprites – but it just never progressed.

Well, of course – doing what we do here at GTW64, we’d like to try and see if anything still remains of the earlier version to get a glimpse at possibly a very different game. There might not be that much to look at however, but potential to show another piece of history.