Games That Weren't

[CrookieMonster]

Hi all,

I'm currently researching games that were earmarked for the CPC but which, for one reason or another, never got a release.

Anyone have names/developer details of such games that I need to check out and track down?

Love to hear. Best wishes.

Dave

[dcdrac]

rim runner - Palace

Judge Dredd and Judge Death

[sigh]

Mega Twins?
Street Fighter 2?

[Puresox]

Great subject, I hope you manage to find out some info on these games that never quite made it.

[TFM]

CPCWiki: Category:Vaporware


... give it a look. 

[arnoldemu]

Here is a link to the category that TFM mentioned:

Category:Vaporware - CPCWiki

[Axelay]

Just looking over that vapourware list, it seems to be missing Taking Tiger Mountain.  It sounds like it used to be on there though and cpc power doesnt have it.  Does anyone know if it was found and removed from the list?

[Shaun M. Neary]

One that springs to mind was the original Outrun Europa. It made prototype stages in some 8 and 16 bit machines (remember reading about this in C+VG bacon in 88), but it got shelved at the 11th hour, and Sega released Turbo Outrun in the arcade instead, which then became the sequel.


Outrun Europa surfaced in 1991, but it was nowhere near the same game.

[AMSDOS]

I've mentioned the Frak! game before which wasn't released on the Amstrad, I'm unsure if it qualifies for Vaporware though cause I'm not even sure if anything got started. I remember Kev having an interest in this game, though the author didn't want anyone to rewrite it. 

[Shaun M. Neary]

Pretty sure Radical's Lethal Moves would make it on to this list too. I remember phoning 'em in 1995 to see what was happening to it, only to be told they ceased further work on the project.

[CrookieMonster]

Thanks so much to everyone for their help!

[Nich]

Pretty sure Radical's Lethal Moves would make it on to this list too. I remember phoning 'em in 1995 to see what was happening to it, only to be told they ceased further work on the project.

Rob Buckley at Radical had a game called Butch Cowardice: The Undersea Adventure which I recall being in development for nearly 3 years before it was abandoned. According to a post by Rob on comp.sys.amstrad.8bit, a lot of work had been done on it. I would love to see some screenshots of what had been accomplished - if anything still exists.

[Gryzor]

Great find, Nich... thanks for the memories of csa8

[Shaun M. Neary]

Ah CSA8bit. A lot of fun memories of chatting on that thing!
On a college computer (in a campus I wasn't even a part of), using my ex girlfriends account using Lynx, a text only browser using dumb terminals.

[Nich]

Ah CSA8bit. A lot of fun memories of chatting on that thing!
On a college computer (in a campus I wasn't even a part of), using my ex girlfriends account using Lynx, a text only browser using dumb terminals.

I have fond memories of csa8 as well in the late 1990s, back in the days before web-based discussion forums. I also accessed it through a text-based Unix terminal using a program called 'tin'. Luckily my university was blessed with a pretty decent Usenet server!

I actually found that post on csa8 while researching information on Lethal Moves nearly three years ago for a CPCWiki article.

[Nich]

Odin's Robin of the Wood was previewed in issue 5 of AMTIX!, complete with screenshots, but it was never released for the CPC.

[attach=2]

I'm sure I can unearth many more Games That Weren't if I had time to browse through my collection of magazines...

[dcdrac]

yes I was looking forward to that my Brother had the Spectrum version and I was sure the CPC version had to be better, unless of course they did a Spectrum port of course.

[Shaun M. Neary]

I absolutely hated tin. slrn was the way to go

[arnoldemu]

Odin's Robin of the Wood was previewed in issue 5 of AMTIX!, complete with screenshots, but it was never released for the CPC.

[attach=2]

I'm sure I can unearth many more Games That Weren't if I had time to browse through my collection of magazines...

please add the list to the wiki.

[zeropolis79]

I've been doing my best to find lost CPC projects for the main GTW project.

A full game of Mega Twins is required as a preview version is in existence.

Demos of Judge Dredd, Amazing Spiderman and Never Ending Story 2 must exist somewhere as ACU previewed/reviewed them with CPC screenshots.

[Gryzor]

Hm, Robin of the Wood surely looks good!

[dcdrac]

The spectrum version was fun my brother had it, I was looking forward to the Amstrad version hint to redoers of old games:

robin of the Wood Amstrad version....

[ralferoo]

Just thought I'd give a bit of context on why games get cancelled...

Even if a game is finished and it seems to everybody strange when the game isn't released, it can take a massive amount of money to get the games out to customers. It's not uncommon nowadays for development costs to be only 10-25% of actual cost of making the games.

One game I worked on a few years ago, the advertising budget was many, many times the development budget and the even cost of music licensing for our game was higher than the development costs, again an expense that only becomes payable at the point the game ships. This kind of massive budget situation is much more common nowadays with AAA games, but would also have been true to an extent in the 8-bit days - any game will need some advertising, making up the tapes, getting them out to the stores, etc. So even if the game is finished, it might still be cheaper to drop the game completely than get it out to customers.

You might argue that they could give the game away for free, but in business eyes this would devalue the normal game price, maybe give people something to play with so they didn't need to buy your next game, or worse releasing an unfinished game (or "complete" but not properly bugtested) could actually negatively affect the reputation of the company. All of these negative outweighs the positive of building customer goodwill with a freebie for a lot of companies.

It's a shame that these games don't often make it out into the open years later when they'd be seized upon as prized "archaeological" finds, but that's almost to be expected - by the time such an unfinished product would no longer negatively affect the company if it was released there's probably nobody left who particularly remembers where to find the source code any more.

I've been quite lucky working in games - in 5½ years, I've only spent a total of 9 months working on 2 different games that got cancelled fairly early into their lifespans. But I've got friends who worked in the games industry for over 10 years before a game they were working on shipped and have 7 different games listed on their CV with "unreleased title" that they can't even talk about because it's still covered by NDAs! It seems strange, but it's actually fairly common.

[TMR]

You might argue that they could give the game away for free, but in business eyes this would devalue the normal game price, maybe give people something to play with so they didn't need to buy your next game, or worse releasing an unfinished game (or "complete" but not properly bugtested) could actually negatively affect the reputation of the company. All of these negative outweighs the positive of building customer goodwill with a freebie for a lot of companies.

Near the end of the 8-bit magazine era that became a job for the covermounts, clearing the decks if you had something reasonably good that didn't fit with the current corporate image. Games that popped up like Subsonic on the C64 were developed but not signed to a publisher and there was even C64 Fun and Amiga Fun importing good games to the UK from European publishers.

There are other factors too; my friend wrote a C64 game, got the contract sorted out from Mastertronic for publishing on their the £1.99 range, cashed the cheque and they had a shift in focus so the budget arm was only being used for re-releases and the game never went on sale. (They were very good about it too, the money stayed with my friend and the people who'd helped him and they released him from the contract to sell it elsewhere if he wanted.)

[Gryzor]

Thanks for the very nice and consise analysis, ralf