Games That Weren't^®

1992 Gremlin Graphics

Platforms: PC, Atari ST and Commodore Amiga

Our next entry into the archives is thanks to the brilliant preservation efforts of Mr Talida, who has been busy preserving all of Dave Lowe’s Amiga/PC disks of late. On one set of disks was what seemed to be a demo of a game called Pandemonium over 2 disks. Sadly the second disk couldn’t be backed up due to the disk coming away from its metal hub. Mr Talida hopes to fix this in the near future to preserve the missing files.

We took a look at what remained, and found that the DOS demo does still run – but with at least half of the assets missing from the second disk, you get a blank screen for most parts. However, keep pressing space a few times and you’ll end up on a map screen where you can fly a balloon to a boat, before it gets stuck (as we can’t see anything else).

It was suspected that the game was intended for Gremlin Graphics, as the Gremlin Graphics archive had an advert entry for a game from the same era that never saw the light of day. Information was very scarce though. One of the files on the disk was called “GREMLIN.256” and converting this into a PNG showed the famous Gremlin logo and confirmed the link.

Whilst trying to search for any other information about the game, including links with the developer Astros Productions (which we found their name mentioned in the images), we chanced across something very cool.

Tucked deep within a DOS games archive (Total_DOS_Collection_Release_14) on archive.org was a preview of the game, but with no mention of Gremlin at all. It seems that Gremlin must have pulled out of wanting to release the game, and so Astros Productions tried to sell the game themselves as Shareware and released a public domain demo.

Within the download, you can find an order form for the full version, which is currently missing. It isn’t known if any full copies were sent out to anyone. If anyone has it, please get in touch!

As for the game itself, the instructions describe the game as follows:

“Pandemonium is an action strategy game for one player. The player is in control of a gang of red coated characters called, the Bobbins. Bobbins are cute, small and vicious. The player is presented on the playing screen as King Bobbins, dressed in purple. King Bobbins can be directly controlled by the player and through him the player can issue various orders to other Bobbins. The object of the game being for King Bobbins to collect all the valuables which can be found hidden in the castles of Bobbinia.”

I had a quick game, but wasn’t 100% certain what to do – even after reading the instructions, and then ran out of time to get the site updates all complete. Once I get more of a chance to play, I’ll update this page – but for now, feel free to check out a preview of this game that was once set to be a Gremlin Graphics game.

Although Dave Lowe produced music for the game, it may not have been used in the later release by Astros. The music recovered by Mr Talida is very different to what is in the preview. It’s possible some of the tunes are locked away further in the demo.

Thanks to Hoagie / Abandonware France, we learn that the game was previewed in the likes of Joystick and Tilt (see scans), where it is confirmed that Amiga, ST and PC versions were in development. Then in 1994, the game was reviewed in some PC magazines such as PC Format issue 29 (Scan missing) and PC Zone issue 12.

Hopefully in time we’ll get to learn what happened and why Gremlin Graphics never ended up releasing it. With a huge thanks to Mr Talida for preserving Dave Lowe’s disks, Hoagie / Abandonware France for information about the release and for scans, Mark Hardisty for the Pandemonium scans and Archive.org for hosting a copy of the preview within their DOS archives.

Downloads

• Assets_Pandemonium
• Preview_Pandemonium

Gallery