Our next Christmas 2024 update sees Games That Weren’t take a look at a series of early concepts and prototypes from the late Archer Maclean’s disks. This includes the first ever look at concepts for an abandoned Atari/Commodore sequel to Dropzone, a special A8 Arcade version of Dropzone, early pre-release Dropzone materials, International Karate A8 prototypes + assets and various IK+ graphical assets.
You can also catch our YouTube video of the various bits and pieces, with commentary. Lets kick things off:
Dropzone 2 concepts
Archer had previously spoken about working on a sequel to Dropzone, where the main character would drop into a cavern environment and go underground. Perhaps he was inspired by Atari’s Major Havoc?
We found nothing playable, but we did find a series of graphic files where Archer was playing with the idea, and you can see all of these concepts below in the gallery for the very first time.
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Dropzone Arcade
A bit of a strange oddity here. Archer was always keen to make Dropzone into an arcade cabinet, and this has become a reality of late. His keenness seems to have been there right from the very start, and within his disks were a series of source code disks with some minor modifications to the Atari version of the game.
I can’t see any major differences in terms of gameplay, but please let us know if you spot anything. The big changes are that you must insert credits by using a second joystick – suggesting that Archer was going to be using a coin mechanism hooked up to the Atari joystick port. A very basic attract mode has also been added where the game plays itself briefly.
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Dropzone early graphics
There wasn’t much, but we found two early logos and what seems to be a very early moonscape that was done for the game – probably when Archer was originally testing out the scroll routine. See Dropzone 2 assets disk for the graphic files or the gallery further below.
Early International Karate mock-ups and prototypes
On one of Archer’s disks, we found an early build of the A8 version of International Karate which has no audio at all and not all of the screens. You can start the game and play as normal, but the bonus levels seem to be missing. There is also another more advanced prototype with music, but not within the game it seems – there might be other differences which we have missed.
In addition to this, there were tons of Atari Screen files showing earlier versions of characters, backgrounds, objects and many unused frames of animation. All of these can be downloaded below.
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Unused IK+ graphics and concepts
No prototypes, as the game was only being developed at the start for the Commodore 64 – however, Archer was using his Atari 800 to code and create the graphics. Again, as with International Karate, there were many screen files which showcase different earlier versions of the background and many different sprites and moves that were never used or tweaked for the final release.
One of the most interesting screens has to be the bomb screens, suggesting that the bomb bonus level that was present in the later 16-bit versions was intended to feature in the Commodore 64 version too. It was perhaps dropped due to space issues, but the graphics can be seen above and also in the gallery below.
Download
All the galleries
Dropzone 2
Dropzone Arcade
Dropzone
International Karate
IK Plus
With huge thanks to Chris Wilkins (Fusion Retro Books) for the loan of Archer’s disks to preserve and permission to add executables to the site, Alan Hammerton for hardware help, Scott Stilphen for the article corrections and Mat Allen for the flippy PC drive loan.
In memory of Archer Maclean – 28 January 1962 – 17 December 2022.
