Games That Weren't^®

1994 Digital Illusions / Psygnosis

Platforms: Commodore Amiga and SEGA MegaDrive

Recently we reported on a lost SEGA MegaDrive conversion of Benefactor, which the press had wrongly attributed screenshots from another game called Hardcore.

Hardcore itself was a fantastic looking Turrican/Assassin clone developed by Digital Illusions, and was due for release on the SEGA MegaDrive. Sadly Psygnosis would pull the plug on all their 16-bit developments before the game would get a chance to be released.

In later years, thankfully the game would see release on the Mega SG as Ultracore. You can read more about this release and see the game in action thanks to Beyond The Scanline’s excellent review.

Though what of the Commodore Amiga version? Well, Hardcore was originally being developed for that platform before it was decided to move all of the work across to the SEGA Megadrive. Various previews were shown in magazines at the time, such as The One and showcasing what was looking like a great action platformer.

It seems that the game had got quite far in development on the platform before being switched over, with many different screens. At one stage the game even had a female protagonist with a fully armoured suit, which you can see in a few of the screenshots. It’s unknown why this was dropped and the protagonist changed.

Compared to the SEGA edition, the Amiga version is very much at large. We don’t believe that it was ever fully completed, but that there could be quite an advanced version out there to find.

Thanks to contributor Iain McNulty, we learn that a digital screenshot of the game was shown in the PD release of Amiganoid, which was created by Digital Illusions. Something clear of the game for now on the Amiga, until anything may surface.

Do you know anything more about the Amiga version, and can anything playable of it be recovered?

With thanks to Iain McNulty for flagging up the title, Fabrizio Bartoloni for reference to the Amiga interview with Andreas Axelsson, Stephen (Mort) Stuttard for the hi-res scans and Hall of Light for helping pinpoint where the game was mentioned in the press.

Gallery