Games That Weren't 64^®

Was it or wasn’t it? The question which has been asked for sometime about whether Chuck Rock on the C64 was ever officially released. To be honest, we had assumed it was – but was just a pain in the backside to find.

But with no-one thought to actually owning an original of the game, a bit of digging found that Core was not happy with the quality of the C64 conversion and decided to cancel it rather than release it. This was even though all the adverts had been published and magazines had reviewed the game. Oddly, it scored 96% in Zzap, which was actually well deserved.

Built by Genias for Core, the conversion was pretty solid and faithful to the original – although the game itself wasn’t the best in the world, and slightly overrated – the conversion was as good as it could have been – with some very good graphics, replication of the original rock band title screen and good music/sfx throughout.

I’ll leave describing the game itself to the review which can be found in the gallery, but essentially the game was a platforming game where you could hitch rides on various creatures and throw rocks.

Thanks to the guys at Ready64, it was found that during development of the game – Core decided to cancel the project due to believing that the C64 market was dwindling. Genias wrote to Core and got written agreement to have the game completed and released only within Italy. In an interview with Genias manager/coordinator, Raffaele Valensise (in Italian at present), it is suggested that working with Core was a rocky time – with no real sense of belief that the game was going to be anywhere near as great as the Amiga title.

Although Core never got the title released in the UK and around Europe, they did congratulate the Genias team for doing such a superb job. Sadly many of us were never given the chance to purchase the game, and for years as a result – the game was subject to question of whether it was ever properly released.

In early 2013, Sam64H from Lemon64 came forward with some photos taken of a copy owned by a friend. I’ve added the photos to the entry, and then later a series of higher quality scans. The tape copy was apparently brought via Ebay UK, and the disk version in Ebay Italia over a decade ago now. It is probably the first time many of us have seen an original copy of hte game.

In May 2014, Holger Klipsch very kindly got in touch with GTW64 after recently purchasing the game. He has also extremely kindly posted us a perfect copy of the game and photocopy of the instructions which we have now added here for you to download. It is essentially a clean copy of the game with no crack intros.

Then finally, in 2017 – Aki Sivula created a TAP backup of the tape version (preserved with DC2N4-LC, and TAP image produced with TAPClean) and has kindly allowed us to add it to the archive. The tape image has been fully tested till the game completion.

This means we can finally close the case on this game! Case closed!

Contributions: Sam64H, Mr Fox, Ready64, Ricchesuccio, Holger Klipsch, Aki Sivula

Supporting content

• Downloads
• Gallery
• Creator speaks
• Articles
• History

Available downloads

• ChuckRock_tape (zip)
• Original_Chuck (zip)
• Game_Chuckrock (zip)

Gallery

Creator speaks

Andrea Paselli posted on Lemon64 about the game:

“As one of the creators of this game, I can’t give it an opinion, but I can thank you all very much!

Especially the authors of this excellent web site that reminds us of our computing origin…

keep going!”

Related articles

Vinny Mainolfi has the game ending listed at: http://www.c64endings.freeolamail.com/endings/c/chuckrock/chuckrock.htm

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Quick translation of a question posted from Ready 64 to Genias team work coordinator thanks to Ricchesuccio

QUESTION: I can imagine the pressure suffered by Luca Zarri and Marco Corazza during the porting of the game. In fact, even the same Stefano Roda told me that this Chuck Rock is the latest project that has followed for Genias. Stefano remembers being angry a lot in those days with those of the CORE because they proved arrogant and porting is not never met them, you want to nonsense like “the little man on the C64 does not have the same colors as the Amiga version …!” or for a sprite that came from the screen 1/10 of a second before the Amiga, or more.

And it’s true what they say about Chuck Rock, that the conversion of Commodore 64 CORE Design at one point decided to delete it? If so, why? And it is true that in the end it was sold only in Italy?

ANSWER (Raffaele Valensise) : I can confirm you what was said! The project of porting Chuck Rock at one point was canceled by Core Design, the justification is that the market for the Commodore 64 was not in their interest. Softel instead referred to the Italian territory, where at the time they were still selling lots of games on tape, he agreed with the then manager of CORE to produce development with an Italian team that was put under contract with Genias.
It should be noted that Riccardo Arioti, founder of Genias, is the nephew of Constantino Arioti of Softel. there were so many competing interests: on the one hand Softel hoped the success of sales and other Genias overlooked the international market!
the team that developed Chuck Rock of C64 was made up of boys from Bologna, therefore under the control of Riccardo Arioti which, as we understand, it was pointing to / risking a lot on this project.
I remember a lot of very emotional when I saw the first demo of the game, which turned out to really live up to the original Amiga.
Softel at the time was very strong in the center and south of Italy, where, unlike the rest of the country, many shops marketed more boxes for the C64, Spectrum and MSX that floppy disk for the Amiga. This, moreover, led to Genias to convert even the (my) game Tilt! Amiga Commodore 64, Spectrum and also PC.

Update history

• 12/01/17 – Aki Sivula provides TAP images for archive. Case now closed!
• 23/05/14 – Holger Klipsch donates a perfect copy of Chuck Rock to add to the archive.