Battle Mission (SEGA Mega Drive)

1990 Renovation Products

Platform: SEGA Mega Drive

Battle Mission was an exciting looking Operation Wolf style game that was due for release on the SEGA Mega Drive back in 1990 by Renovation Products.

The game was based in the middle of World War 2, where you are on your tour of duty of the South Pacific. You are forced to land on an enemy island, as a sole survivor of your sunken battleship – Liberty.

You have to get back to your forces, and must blast your way through all the levels with your machine gun and bombs, shooting bad guys and avoiding monkeys, native women and other innocents along the way. Basically – Operation Wolf!

The aim is to try and reach the airfield to commandeer a plane to escape on – which we assume (based on the screenshots shown in magazines) you then switch to being inside a plane and having to shoot other enemy planes. Not sure if you have a plane on the screen and have to defend it in a side scroller view, or if you are within the aircraft and shooting from the sides.

Quite a few magazines previewed the game, and the screenshots were very impressive overall – featuring very large characters. It looked fairly complete too, so its confusing as to why the game never actually saw release. We don’t think the screens are mock ups, so we can only assume it was a quality control issue of some kind. MDFan magazine confirmed that the Renovation Products had the game on display at the 1990 Summer CES event, along with Final Zone and Whip Rush. The magazine also confirmed that the game that two people could play at the same time.

Renovation Products was a US publisher for Mega Drive games by Nihon Telenet, so its likely that Nihon Telenet were the developers for the title (though Renovation did publish titles by others according to Sega Retro). Renovation would merge into Sega in 1993 and Nihon Telenet would continue to do Mega Drive games right up until 1992/93.

So what happened to Battle Mission? We hope to learn more soon, but if you know anything more about the development – please do get in touch.

With thanks to Ross Sillifant for highlighting, to Sega Retro for links to magazines, Archive.org, Abandonware Magazines and Stephen Stuttard for various scans.