Only a few C64 sceners who stayed around until the end with Commodore Format magazine will remember this game probably.
10th Dan was to be a ground breaking martial arts beat-em-up game by Jon Wells, featuring two massive sprites and game play and graphics to beat IK+ to a pulp.
Originally promised to feature a whole array of tunes, high quality samples, excellent graphics and variety of maps (Which were to scroll as well) and some awesome moves to create a very playable game. But the big thing was that Jon aimed to squeeze this entire game into a single load!
Well, its safe to say that after time during its development, Jon realised that this dream would not be possible, and so a Multi-load was staring the game in the face.
During the dying days of the C64, the game had its own diary instalment in Commodore Format magazine, detailing Jon’s progress for the game and taking the reader through all the problems that were occurring It was a very interesting read, and with all the progress screenshots, it looked very promising indeed. And you can now read all 9 parts in the gallery area below.
At the time, Jon had a lot of projects on the go for the C64, and sadly the support was not that great for them. People were just not buying games, and eventually Jon decided to slow down his productions and even cancel some too. After a trial on Supportware, which Jon created, it was found that trying to sell games on the C64 was going to be hard. So hard infact that Jon decided to call it a day. Not that he has stopped all production completely, but we may not see as many bits of code for our c64’s like we used to.
Since GTW came about, we asked Jon about his titles, and mostly they have all been put on hold. 10th Dan came up in conversation, and Jon pretty much confirms that 10th Dan will never be completed. But we cannot bring you any preview just yet, because Jon wishes to use the code for something else, maybe C64 or even another machine. The thing is, it MAY be finished in the future in some form or another.
For now, we bring an entry on the game with an insight into the game’s graphics, including a rare colour screenshot. In the near future, Jon will hopefully give us some emulation screenshots to have a look at.
The one part of the game that has been released is the actual game music which Jon did some years back. We therefore bring you the SID tunes as a download for the time being.
The Art Ravers originally saw the previews according to rumour, and they felt it was a fantastic game that was coming along. What with the quality of Jon’s previous work, it is not hard to imagine that the game would have been great
Jon has kindly passed on an emulation grabbed image of 10th Dan in action, so you can finally see in full glory what the game was looking like. Makes a change from scans! ;-)
We are hoping to provide a video clip of the game in motion in the future with Jon’s permission..
Contributions: Andrew Fisher, Jon Wells, Stephen Stuttard (scans)
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Music_10thdan.zip (zip)
Gallery
Creator speaks
Jon Wells speaks briefly to GTW about 10th Dan…
“This game is on hold, but may make an appearence one day. Is planned for a PC release in the future.
Feel free to mention it on the GTW, but only as a screenshot.”
Jon Wells.
Haha! There it is. I just saw the Bitmap Books twitter on the Games That Weren’t book, I seem to remember more screenshots though. I was obsessed about these type of games when I was a teenager and as IK+ etc(Exploding Fist, Fist II, Fist+) were so awesome I was really looking forward to this one.
It’s a real shame that this game will never see light of day.
I do question how far Jon got with this and whether there was a coded version or in fact it was just graphics, sprites and music.
I think this one is a closed book.
It certainly was at a playable stage :) … Jon took some screenshots from a runnable version once for us.
Wayne Wormsley has also claimed to have seen the game in action when he went to visit Jon once.
I’ll give Jon a shout and see if he can do a video capture of the game at some point. I think the only reason why this isn’t in GTW64 at the moment is because deep down Jon still wants to finish the game. I’d love to see it happen!