Games That Weren't 64^®

A well received game on the Amiga, “Apprentice” was to be another great release from Rainbow Arts in 1990. The game made its way into magazines, via double sided adverts, but as usual the game never surfaced on the C64. The Amiga version featured incredible artworks, and it was foretold that the C64 would follow similiar suite.

One of the artists was established as Drew Northcott, who claimed that Probe were behind the conversion. Drew just did a few bits of missing graphics for them remotely, but didn’t know who else was involved. Many moons ago, John Cassells once said he did a load of sprite graphics for a Probe game called Apprentice, which must be the very same development:

 “I *should* have the sprite graphics for Apprentice (which I was doing for Probe) on disk somewhere”.

Thanks to contributor Nemo, the World of Spectrum entry on the game had more credits – and there are details about what happened from Brian Beuken for at least that version:

“[This was] probably the last game I did on Speccy, the machine was dying off and the returns were dropping…shame really as it was a very cool big game even made use of 128K if it was detected. I had a helluva time fitting it in.

It was done and dusted but Rainbow Arts decided to add some more levels to it on the main Amiga version, but this was really pushing things too far on the humble speccy and while I was trying to fit these new levels in it got canned. Shame.”

Interestingly the manual present on Hall of Light (and which we’ve added here) contains loading instructions for all the 8-bit versions. We can understand why the Spectrum version may have been unreleased, but not the C64 – which was still going relatively strong at the time. Rainbow Arts had also been continuing to release C64 games into 1991. Maybe therefore there were issues with that particular conversion?

We checked with Grant Harrison and Nick Jones, and they both confirmed not having any involvement at all on the game. So who was it then? Well – Anonymous Contributor suggested it may have been Manfred Trenz, who spoke with Swedish magazine Datormagazin Dec 1990, page 8. This was an article on Rainbow Arts. When Manfred was interviewed, he said the following:

“I’m the one who created Katakis and right now I’m doing a new advanced game called ‘Apprentice’ (reviewed in DM 17/90), says [Manfred].”

Manfred doesn’t explicitly say he is doing the C64 version, so it could have been helping out the Amiga version (which was coded by Axel Hellwig). Later in the Datormagazin interview, it says that Manfred was sitting in a small room with his friend Andreas, programming new, cool C64 games.

It might be that Manfred was originally working on the C64 version, but perhaps he got distracted by Turrican that he began working on? We think this happened, as recently Keith Purkiss (aka Pakman) confirmed that he wrote the C64 edition whilst freelancing for Probe Software back in the day. Keith didn’t know why the game was never released and only just found out it wasn’t thanks to our entry.

In 2024, Keith found all of his work disks, including his work on Apprentice. However, it seems that Keith didn’t finish the conversion, and when the game was cancelled – it was only at a very early stage. Loading up the preview, there is 1 level overall which is more of a test level if anything and is very glitchy at this stage.

It does seem to be shaping up well, and if it was cancelled due to the glitches – then that would be quite harsh. We think there must be other reasons as to why Rainbow Arts and Probe didn’t continue with the 8-bit editions.

For now, check out an early glimpse at what could have been a decent C64 conversion, and wonder just how it could have been had it been finished.

Contributions: Zeldin, Andrew Fisher, Drew Northcott, Nemo, Anonymous Contributor, Keith Purkiss, John Cassells, CSixx, Jazzcat, Martin Pugh

Supporting content

• Downloads
• Gallery
• History

Available downloads

• Preview_Apprentice (zip)
• 3283_manual1 (pdf)

Gallery

Update history

• 20/12/24 – Final development recovered and added!
• 26/08/24 – Developer confirmed!
• 15/10/16 – Slight artist credit located.