Games That Weren't^®

A quick post showing two early Atari Lynx developments which would eventually turn into something completely different. Thanks to Ross Sillifant for highlighting both.

The first is a title called Monster Demolition, which has some video footage online of the game running. Here is a screenshot from an Italian gaming magazine which shows another scene from the game, and from a town/city scenario:

The game was apparently turned into Rampage, though as you can see – this was looking quite different, with much larger main characters. The game though at the time was renamed to Rampage Deluxe.

It does seem odd how this started off not as a Rampage conversion in the first place – perhaps they were not confident of obtaining the licence at the time, so started a clone as a precaution? Hopefully we’ll learn more about this one soon from the developer Peter Wierzbicki.

Then we have Impossible Mission, which would eventually be released as Electrocop on the platform. The screenshot shown doesn’t really have any major differences (if any) at all, and it seems just the name was dropped for reasons currently unknown.

It has been rumoured for years that Electrocop was originally intended to be a sequel to Impossible Mission, though Greg Omi couldn’t recall if that was the case or not. However, it seems the press at the time were told that it was going to be called Impossible Mission. Several sources (including ACE magazine) have been added here, so you can see for yourself.

Thanks to Ross, a video was also found to be shown of the game running in a Famimaga (Famicom Magazine) video from January 1990:

It begs the question of why the popular title was not used in the end – something perhaps we’ll run past some other people and will update here when we learn more.

With thanks to Ross Sillifant for the heads up and scans and resources, and also archive.org for the Rampage Deluxe scans.

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