1989 Grandslam
Platform: Amiga
Ok, before you start shouting – yes, Pac-Land was indeed released on the Commodore Amiga, and it was pretty terrible too. However, it seems that things could have been very different indeed, when contributor Hank highlighted a video on YouTube showcasing a very different and much improved version.
We also made a quick video to show you it in action here:
As you can see, it looks and feels a lot better than the version that we ended up with. It is quite advanced overall, though it crashes at present when you get past Stage 7 (where you can also walk on the water).
The question is where did it come from? It seems that this earlier development was leaked quite early on and has been around for some time, but not really covered in much detail or its existence covered. It is so different from the final release, that it must have been by a different development team.
We asked C64 developer Allan Ogg if perhaps it was the work of his co-programmer, the late Martin Gannon. He explained that it was highly unlikely, given how stressed and burnt out the team were after doing the C64 conversion – but he concluded with “Never say never”. So at present it is unknown who exactly was behind the development – but maybe there are some clues tucked away within the preview?
Codetapper has very kindly gone through the preview, and first of all has extracted all of the graphics out to include in our gallery. Everything seems to be fully used, with nothing that wasn’t included.
Sadly they found no clues as to who was behind the game – with nothing obvious within the code. Codetapper hopes to compare the music to confirm the author and possibly at some date to some analysis of the code to see if it matches anything similar by someone else.
With thanks to Codetapper for the supplied sprite sheets and help with digging through the demo.
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Gallery
Hey
Nice work with this Pac-Land for Amiga , is the work down ?
it coming to be update ?
Perra
Hi there – sadly no further clues as to who was behind the game or what happened to it. So we’ve hit a bit of a brick wall at the moment – the feeling is that it may have been worked on by the late Martin Gannon. Hopefully will come across the page and know more.
Id like to do a video on this subject, maybe drum up some more info as to who did it.
I know I know I get a lot of Developers and Musicians such as Matt Gray, Martin Webb, Jeroen Tel etc watching my Youtube videos.
Would it be ok to reference your site and details you know about the game in that video?
Hi there – please feel free to, the more news spreads about the preview – the better. Let me know once you have done something on the game, and i’ll add a link to the page and will retweet etc.