First offered in Zzap issue 62 in their Zzuperstore as a special offer, Purple Saturn Day never quite made the light of day on the C64 for reasons still unknown today.
Judging by the adverts published in CVG, the game was a kind of sequel to Captain Blood, featuring very similar graphics and published by the same publisher. Now Exxos didn’t stay around long, but they were part of Infogrammes, who still go strong today. So it wasn’t a publisher crash which caused this title to die out.
Strangely the game was actually released across most of the planned formats, but just never happened on the C64. It received good results throughout the magazines, even on the Spectrum where it got a grade in the 80-90% range.
The only guess is that either the developers ran into troubles with the game on the C64, or the C64 version was dropped as Infogrammes moved away from the C64. Infogrammes were not too keen on the C64 due to their French roots, where the Amstrad, Spectrum and Amiga were far more popular.
So how far did the conversion get at least?… We are not sure, but with a game so similar to Captain Blood, could the game of had the same developers? We are taking this on board as a possibility as we aim to find out what happened exactly and if we can salvage anything of this game. With a developer name now known, it seems that something was started!
Yet another search begins…
Contributions: Peter Weighill, Ross Sillifant, Nemo
“Thierry Levastre”
http://www.bozocircus.free.fr/tlevastre_cv2.pdf
(Conversion pour la C64)
http://www.bozocircus.free.fr/e_purple.php
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http://usebu.forumactif.org/t1030-thierry-levastre
“. 4. After making the adaptation of Purple Saturn Day Exxos C64, you go home Ocean France. You take part in 1991 in adapting Pang who will win the Golden Tilt Best Adapted arcade! “
ST review in ACE Issue 17 Feb’89 (Pages 46+47 if your looking to put more scans up ) has C64/128 version as :Under Development.
At the end of C+VG’s ST review, they have both C64 and Zx Speccy versions as arriving later in the spring.(Issue 89 P35 if your looking to put image up.)