A very small post to just share a previously unseen Flying Shark asset from the original game before it was handed over to Dominic Robinson and John Cummings at Graftgold Ltd. Yes, that is right – Bob Pape within his recent book on R-Type had disclosed that there was an earlier version of Flying Shark in development at Catalyst.
There was also an earlier Rampage development under way at Catalyst by a chap called Stephen Waldie. When Stephen found out he wouldn’t be paid until the end, he walked as he could not afford to live without a regular income stream.
Unfortunately, the Flying Shark coder was not quite up to the project and walked out after only a few weeks. Both projects were moved onto other developers before being finished off and released.
Thanks to Bob Pape, we can at least share part of the Flying Shark V1 remains which he found on a development disk. It just contains an unused side panel which would have gone into the Catalyst version of the game. Maybe some day more will be recovered, but we doubt either game got very far at all.
I had a demo of Rampage for the Spectrum; one of those free tapes you used to get on the front of magazines in the late 80s.