1992 Millennium
Platforms: Atari ST and Commodore Amiga
Our next entry is for an arcade action adventure game set in the East, where you must guide Chinto through a castle full of traps and evil guards to avenge his parents’ death.
Spread across around 400 screens with a slanted top-down viewpoint, the game was to be a console-style martial arts game with Chinto avoiding traps, navigating mazes and engaging in combat galore with ninjas, guards and a large red dragon at one stage. The graphical style was very interesting overall, with characters that had small bodies and large heads.
Developed and designed by Wing Lai, the music was being composed by the late and great Richard Joseph, with graphics carried out by Paul Dobson and Rob Chapman. Overseeing the entire project was project co-ordinator Jason Spiller.
Paul was new to the project at the time and his first task was with creating an impressive cinematic introduction sequence. When it was premiered at the summer 1991 European Computer Show, it generated a lot of interest according to Games-X magazine. Rob would would focus on the background graphics for the game and main foundations, with Paul then later focusing on the characters themselves. There would be a lot of back and forth with Wing Lai to ensure the style of the game was nailed down.
Although previewed in several magazines of the time, the game just disappeared – until it popped up in the October 1992 edition of Amiga Power magazine. Within a small segment, it was revealed that the game was cancelled simply because sufficient progress was not being made. Millenium’s Ian Saunter suggested at the time that the game may one day appear, but was no longer a top priority for them.
It seemed that it never became a priority at all and the game would completely disappear off the face of the earth. It is a huge shame, as it seems that a lot was done visually at least when you see all the screenshots. We wonder if there was a lot more to it than just insufficient progress?
We hope to speak to the development team in the future to find out more and hopefully shed light on this long lost title. For now, check out the gallery screenshots to get a feel for what may have been.
With thanks to Grzegorz Antosiewicz for highlighting the title and providing all of the extracted scans and screenshots.
Gallery
