1983 Big Five Software
Platforms: Atari 2600, 5200, 400 and 800
Following Miner 2049er, Bounty Bob was now set for the Big City and its fire department, where he must fight a major skyscraper fire in what was to be Scraper Caper. Sadly, the game was never to be.
Way back in 2001, Bill Hogue gave a reply back on a user group about the game:
“Scraper Caper was supposed to be our next game after Miner 2049er. We had a lot of success with Miner and ended up licensing it for just about every computer that existed at the time. This put a lot of pressure on us to come up with something that was incredible and could duplicate Miner’s popularity.”
“Our first cut had Bounty Bob at the base of a high-rise building on fire. He had gotten work as a fireman after finally getting out of the mines. (He had also slimmed down, if I remember!) The concept would have had the player controlling him throughout this building in search of people to rescue or items to save.
We had a large part of it programmed but it never seemed to go anywhere so we abandoned it. We started another totally different game that had Bounty Bob on this 3-D style maze with angry little fireballs after him. I spent a ton of time getting the look right so that Bounty Bob and the little fireballs would move in and out around the playfield correctly. What we ended up producing was a stunning looking screen masking dull game play.
So we finally chose to do what we should have done in the first place: make a really cool sequel to Miner 2049er and put Bounty Bob back in the mine. We had a tremendous amount of fun coming up with all the new levels and contraptions.”
Sadly, Bill also confirmed that nothing of Scraper Caper exists these days – so any chance of finding something of the game could be slim. In an interview with Retro Gamer in 2007, Bill confirmed he had thrown away the disks and tapes containing the game, and later said he felt foolish for the decision to cancel the game, as a lot of work was put into it.
Bill had mentioned in his 2001 reply that there was possibility something of the game was on video tape, and that indeed did surface at one point! Bill surfaced again on Atari Age in 2021, and revealed that Curtis Mikolyski had found a promotional video that had some of the game on show.
Unfortunately the video was made private not too long afterwards, and as a result – many have not been able to see how the game would have looked. Hopefully we can get hold of Curtis to see about accessing the video to obtain some screenshots.
With thanks to Joshua Dove and Ross Sillifant for highlighting and Archive.org for the scans.
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