1984 First Star Software
Platform: Commodore VIC-20
An intriguing lost First Star Software game for the Commodore VIC-20, which did see a previously unreleased Commodore 64 edition saved some years ago.
The game was flagged up on Ward F. Shrake’s VIC 20 list as vapourware, and was reviewed in Compute! magazine in May 1984 along with the TRS-80 Color edition.
There is oddly no mention of a Commodore 64 conversion, so we wondered if there was a printing error in the magazine and if they meant to say Commodore 64 instead. Well, thanks to contributor Larry Cameron, it has been found that it isn’t vapourware at all.
An ebay auction with an 1983 advert, shows the game being advertised for both TRS-80 and the VIC-20. What’s even better is that the VIC-20 edition lists a coding credit to a Wayne Lam. We’ve added a photo from the auction of the advert below.
So what happened to the game, and could anything be found of the VIC-20 edition? Hopefully we’ll find Wayne at some point to learn more and see if anything may still exist after all this time.
With thanks to Fabrizio Bartoloni, Ward F. Shrake and Larry Cameron.
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I dont’ think it was a printing error! The C64 version was written by someone else. I have seen recently an ebay listing for an advertisement from First Star Software (unknown magazine or month, google “First the good news! First Star has 4 new games”) that lists four games, Panic Button for VIC20 being one of them, with the author listed for it as Wayne Lam. The author for the C64 version author on the title screen for the recently surface rom is Paul Kanevsky! So this ROM for VIC20 is still out there maybe!!
Brilliant find Larry, and thanks for that! I’ll update the page now along with a credit to yourself!
My pleasure! Sure would love to locate the ROM :)