Thanks to Richard Hewison for highlighting this particular GTW, and a rather interesting one at that!
Arcade Classics was a real fantastic budget title which did extremely well with its compilation of 4 classic games in one load, and with Rob Hubbards excellent music. For £1.99 it was a sure fire success and it would have been really silly to not produce a sequel.
Well, a sequel was indeed planned by Firebird, but according to Richard, he never saw any evidence to suggest that any coding was ever started. It is possible that the game was just part of an internal wish-list before Firebird was sold to Microprose at a later date.
The compilation was planned to feature Frogger, Galaxians, Defender and Missile Command… which would have been an awesome lineup for the sequel. It’s unsure if any of these were started, but its possible that Dave could have coded some of these individually first (Like he did with Space Invaders).
We heard from Dave himself in 2015, who was last seen when interviewed by Commodore Zone magazine in around 1998-99. He managed to dig out his other long lost game, Advanced Terrain Gardener a long time back… but it seems that Arcade Classics 2 never got started. The above titles were confirmed, but it seems only written down on a scrap of paper and never actually started.
It looks indeed that no Arcades Classics sequel will ever be found!
Case closed!
Contributions: Richard Hewison, Ross Sillifant, Dave Korn
Supporting content
Gallery
Creator speaks
Dave Korn talks about Arcade Classics 2 …
“Thinking back on it, I’m fairly certain that I was intent on putting Missile Command and Defender (and maybe Frogger?) clones into it, and beyond that I was open to suggestions from the Firebird office crew – in particular, my project manager Colin Fuidge (a great bloke and still my friend to this day). I think we kicked a few ideas round but I don’t recall us even getting as far as writing down a speculative list on paper. Colin might remember better.
Incidentally, there’s a story about the original Arcade Classics that I haven’t shared widely yet: when Colin and I first drew up and signed the contract for its development, the proposed title that the game was to be released under was “œFour Unreleased Computer Knockouts”! 
We nearly got away with it too, but someone in management spotted what we were up to and told us to change it, and that’s when we came up with the “œArcade Classics” name.”
Update history
- 04/01/15 – Details from David Korn added
- 22/06/14 – Magazine scan added thanks to Ross Sillifant
COR! This is definitely in my wish-list :-)
Fingers crossed we get to hear and see more.