Lost or unreleased game you'd love to play

Games for Spectrum, C64, Amstrad, Amiga, Apple ][ and the rest of the 8-bit and 16-bit platforms. Pleas for help, puzzles, bug reports etc.

Moderator: Alastair

Message
Author
User avatar
Gunness
Site Admin
Posts: 1826
Joined: Tue Dec 07, 2004 7:04 pm
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Contact:

Lost or unreleased game you'd love to play

#1 Post by Gunness » Tue Jun 01, 2010 8:52 am

After having been on the lookout for Klartz and the Dark Forces for at least 10 years, I managed to locate the game a few days ago. It was like getting a Christmas present in the middle of summer :) (of course, the game cannot in any way, shape or form live up to those ridiculously massive expectations).

So, are there any "lost" or unreleased games out there that you would love to get your hands on?
Personally, I'm pretty bummed that none of these games are on my computer right now:
  • The Key of Hope: the sequel to Tower of Despair does exist for the Speccy but has gone AWOL. According to C&VG's review, the game's objects float after you once you've dropped them. Either their review copy was buggy or it was some entirely new means of keeping inventory. But I'm intrigued!
  • Gnome Free: the designed-but-never-programmed third Ingrid game from Level 9. The first two were a lot of fun so I'd love to see the third one.
  • Three Days in Carpathia: sequel to Valkyrie 17 which I hold in very high esteem. Bring it on!

User avatar
Gunness
Site Admin
Posts: 1826
Joined: Tue Dec 07, 2004 7:04 pm
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Contact:

Re: Lost or unreleased game you'd love to play

#2 Post by Gunness » Thu Jun 03, 2010 8:00 am

No takers? There has to be other pseudo-obsessive collectors like myself out there ;)

User avatar
Samwise
Posts: 87
Joined: Mon May 17, 2010 1:23 pm
Contact:

Re: Lost or unreleased game you'd love to play

#3 Post by Samwise » Fri Jun 04, 2010 1:04 am

well, apart from wishing Infocom had ported a Z-machine interpreter to the beeb (wish now granted), and that there'd also been some beeb ports of games popular on other platforms (incl. Shadows of Mordor, The Crack of Doom, Dizzy, Chuckie Egg 2 etc.) ... but these may not be quite in the spirit of your question.

I've racked my brain a bit and the best I can think of is perhaps The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - Infocom's planned sequel to Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A couple of very small development versions surfaced a couple of years back but development didn't appear to have got very far. Great shame that ...

As well as that, I was disappointed when LucasArts never finished Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix or Full Throttle: Payback.

Well, after depressing myself with remembering those ... that's probably enough for now ... ;)

Sam.

User avatar
Samwise
Posts: 87
Joined: Mon May 17, 2010 1:23 pm
Contact:

Re: Lost or unreleased game you'd love to play

#4 Post by Samwise » Fri Jun 04, 2010 9:28 am

ooh, and just remembered that I was also disappointed when work was abandoned on the 2D version of Simon the Sorcerer 3. The 3D game that was eventually released didn't really stand up against the first two games in the series ...

Sam.

User avatar
Plissken
Posts: 27
Joined: Thu Nov 26, 2009 12:54 pm

Re: Lost or unreleased game you'd love to play

#5 Post by Plissken » Fri Jun 04, 2010 12:55 pm

Text adventure wise, i'd really like to play Shoggoth for C64. The game was completed but all the official copies were lost in a fire and the programmer's personal copies have never been found. There is hope for a pirated copy to emerge one day or one another, but this is pretty unlikely to happen. :(

User avatar
Gunness
Site Admin
Posts: 1826
Joined: Tue Dec 07, 2004 7:04 pm
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Contact:

Re: Lost or unreleased game you'd love to play

#6 Post by Gunness » Fri Jun 04, 2010 1:41 pm

@Plissken: please educate me :) I've never even heard of Shoggoth.

@Sam: Yes, I'd love to forget the bugridden travesty that was Simon 3D. Blind-buy for me and some of the worst money I spent that year.

My idea with the thread was mostly games that wasn't available in any format, but sadly vanished conversions have a right to be here, too ;)
As for Hitchhiker's II - thanks a bundle for the link! I had clean forgotten about that page. It's a real treasure trove for people who like to hear about the inner workings of the Infocom production team. And even Anita Sinclair - I thought she'd fallen off the face of the earth.

Did you ever read any of the emails in the article that were since removed? I've tried to piece some information together from the response thread, but as it is, it's a bit difficult to understand what the fuss was all about. Apart from the fact that Andy has published some mails that weren't meant for the masses to read.

User avatar
Plissken
Posts: 27
Joined: Thu Nov 26, 2009 12:54 pm

Re: Lost or unreleased game you'd love to play

#7 Post by Plissken » Fri Jun 04, 2010 7:43 pm

Shogoth (i misspelled the title in the post before) was an italian C64 text adventure which sadly never saw the light of the day.

According to this interview to the game's author (in italian) the game was completed and was reviewed on the 25 issue of the italian version of Zzap (a popular C64 magazine).
The game had an horror/fantasy setting and is tought to be very good.
The game's master was bought by a small italian software house, System Editoriale, but the master got burnt in a fire ten days before it's duplication.
Also the author's personal copies (already compiled, so it wasn't impossible to return to the source code) were stolen by a mysterious thief who stole the contents of the author's and his neighbours garage, so the only hope to see one day a working copy of the game relies in the very few software pirates that managed to snatch a copy of the game.

User avatar
Samwise
Posts: 87
Joined: Mon May 17, 2010 1:23 pm
Contact:

Re: Lost or unreleased game you'd love to play

#8 Post by Samwise » Wed Jun 23, 2010 11:28 am

Gunness wrote:@Sam: Yes, I'd love to forget the bugridden travesty that was Simon 3D. Blind-buy for me and some of the worst money I spent that year.
I bought a copy off eBay and when it arrived it was a really poor quality inkjet printed label / burned CD-R package. I complained to the seller who seemed surprised I had an issue - but he directed me to the company, Idigicon, that was producing them because they were actually legit. Yech. Not that I've ever really played it properly, it was rushed out because the developers couldn't get anyone to front up the measly £100k required to complete the 2D version that was well under way.
Gunness wrote:As for Hitchhiker's II - thanks a bundle for the link! I had clean forgotten about that page. It's a real treasure trove for people who like to hear about the inner workings of the Infocom production team. And even Anita Sinclair - I thought she'd fallen off the face of the earth.
Yer welcome. I thought it'd go down well here with anyone who hadn't read it in a while ...
Gunness wrote:Did you ever read any of the emails in the article that were since removed? I've tried to piece some information together from the response thread, but as it is, it's a bit difficult to understand what the fuss was all about. Apart from the fact that Andy has published some mails that weren't meant for the masses to read.
I think I did - I picked up on the page fairly early on, but I can't remember any specifics. TBH, it was basically just a poor showing from Andy who seemed to have missed some of the fundamentals of good journalism. There's a difference between quoting from something said in public, to things that were clearly said in private correspondence. If I remember right, the emails contained what you'd expect from behind-the-scenes mail - various disagreements and debates over the direction of games and the company. Michael Bywater being particularly colourful. However, Andy should never have published them verbatim. He could easily have done a summation of the discussions and published that without naming names. Even the people who wrote and received those mails would be hard pushed to put them into context after all this time, I suspect, so I don't know why he chose to do that. It didn't even add much of interest really from the general public's point of view.

What I'd like to know is what Andy's done with everything else on that hard disk since. Someone must have had access to something similar to that drive, because the version numbers for Milliways / The Restaurant at the End of the Universe alpha builds that he released had already been recorded in Paul Doherty's Infocom Fact Sheet when that blog post was created. I'd love to see some of the unreleased final internal versions of Infocom projects which are listed in that Fact Sheet, hit the web - I assume they're on that disk too. Like the last unreleased bug-fixed v3 version of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 113330.

Sam.

terri
Posts: 1250
Joined: Wed Dec 15, 2004 5:08 am
Location: Canada

Re: Lost or unreleased game you'd love to play

#9 Post by terri » Thu Jun 24, 2010 11:13 pm

Speaking of HHGTTG, and this is totally off topic since it is about a book and not a game, Book 6 has just been released (at least in this hemisphere), written in Doug Adam's style. Maybe someone will "translate" it into a game? Eventually?

User avatar
Gunness
Site Admin
Posts: 1826
Joined: Tue Dec 07, 2004 7:04 pm
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Contact:

Re: Lost or unreleased game you'd love to play

#10 Post by Gunness » Fri Jun 25, 2010 8:51 am

IMO Douglas Adams ran out of steam during book 4. Mostly Harmless was more like Mostly Pointless. Maybe they should give the series a rest.
Should a new game come out, it won't be an adventure game. Perhaps a MMORPG?

terri
Posts: 1250
Joined: Wed Dec 15, 2004 5:08 am
Location: Canada

Re: Lost or unreleased game you'd love to play

#11 Post by terri » Sun Jun 27, 2010 1:51 am

I agree that the latter books were not as funny as the first ones.

So we'll see what this one brings.

BTW what does MMORPG mean? RPG I think I get.

dave
Posts: 606
Joined: Tue Aug 21, 2007 10:20 pm

Re: Lost or unreleased game you'd love to play

#12 Post by dave » Sun Jun 27, 2010 11:22 am

terri wrote:BTW what does MMORPG mean? RPG I think I get.
Massively Multiplayer On-line Role-Playing Game

Think World of Warcraft or Everquest, basically an RPG with thousands of players.

terri
Posts: 1250
Joined: Wed Dec 15, 2004 5:08 am
Location: Canada

Re: Lost or unreleased game you'd love to play

#13 Post by terri » Sun Jun 27, 2010 9:15 pm

Thanks, Dave.

I think I'll stick to old-fashioned text adventures, with few graphics and no sound. Not to mention random elements...

User avatar
Alex
Posts: 958
Joined: Tue Oct 24, 2006 10:45 pm
Location: Netherlands

Re: Lost or unreleased game you'd love to play

#14 Post by Alex » Wed Aug 11, 2010 8:34 pm

I have been searching for years for The Seventh Generation: A Computer Adventure in a Book by Hal Renko. The same one who wrote The Antoganists and the mystery of Arendarvon castle. The books which each contain one adventure game have been published in English and Dutch for several platforms. Allthough I only have seen the Dutch versions on the internet and never the English versions. Apart from the Dutch version of the antoganists and the mystery of Arendarvon Castle, I do own a copy of the book with the English version of the mystery of Arendarvon castle but I never typed the programm. I know there has been published this third adventure game The seventh generation, but until now I never did find a copy.

blurgle
Posts: 6
Joined: Thu Aug 14, 2008 2:20 pm

Re: Lost or unreleased game you'd love to play

#15 Post by blurgle » Wed Dec 08, 2010 2:30 am

Plissken wrote:According to this interview to the game's author (in italian) the game was completed and was reviewed on the 25 issue of the italian version of Zzap (a popular C64 magazine).
The game had an horror/fantasy setting and is tought to be very good.
The game's master was bought by a small italian software house, System Editoriale, but the master got burnt in a fire ten days before it's duplication.
Also the author's personal copies (already compiled, so it wasn't impossible to return to the source code) were stolen by a mysterious thief who stole the contents of the author's and his neighbours garage, so the only hope to see one day a working copy of the game relies in the very few software pirates that managed to snatch a copy of the game.
That Shogoth story is hard to beat. Fires, mysterious thieves... you could make an adventure game about this!

Post Reply