A surprise finding for GTW from a bundle of disks were recently sent in 2007 to GTW from Wayne Billingham, and on these disks came this very game. A preview of a fairly complete looking title called “The Power of Black Bandit”. Thanks to Skeletor for packing it up for GTW.
The game is a kind of Cauldron/Metal Warrior/Tusari type of game, or at least it reminds me quite heavily of those games for some reason. You control Craig Blades who jumps around quite happily – but we’re not sure what else. We sadly know nothing about the game’s story at present.
We do however have credits, and this was a game done in Denmark around 1987-1988 which was done by Robert Torp and Kristian Larsen, who met through a Danish computer magazine when they were around 17-19 yrs old.
The game was actually fully completed, and sent to various games companies. Sadly no one picked up the game, and it was left to disappear into obscurity.
Wayne had this to shed on the game…
“While doing Bobby Bounce Back (For dynamic developments I think, with Chris Walsh)…..They were a new start-up, getting games worked on ready for release (which never happened).
I think they basically lined up people to work together, on the promise of releasing game and getting royalties. I think in all the time I worked on Bobby Bounce Back I got about 10 quid for xmas. I met them for about 10 minutes at a computer show in London (met Chris for a few seconds…we sat down to wait for him, and he couldn’t find us..).
Anyway..
They sent me a demo and asked if I could spruce up the artwork. But it didn’t get any further than that… (to be honest, I don’t think it was very good)…
I think dynamic developments vanished, though I’m sure the people are likely to still be ‘in the industry’…”
This particular demo seems quite big, and really it doesn’t seem like much more was required to finish it off. But the question remains about what happened to the complete game and does one exist?
As an additional extra, the preview comes with some graphic files as we found on one of Wayne’s disks. He did indeed start some graphics, which you can view by loading the panel file which is on the disk. This loads up in Firebird’s Graphic Editor, and gives a glimpse of some of the enhancements Wayne was attempting to make to the game.
It is not a fantastic game, but it is a nice title to find and preserve in GTW. Hopefully you will have fun exploring it, and in the meantime we hope to find out a lot more about this title. It is now hoped that the full game could some day be found. Although Kristian no longer has it – it is hoped that Robert Torp does.
Contributions: Skeletor, Kristian K Larsen, Wayne Billingham
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Preview_Blackbandit.zip (zip)
Gallery
Update history
- 22/08/24 – Tidy up of the page.
- 17/09/17 – Details from the author added.
A question, are line breaks possible somehow? I used them in my previous message, but they vanished and it may be hard to read now.test
You may have noticed that some rooms crash as you enter them (the one with the witch, and the one with two doors on the same x-position). Fortunately, this can be fixed (assuming the download on this GTW64 page):
LOAD”BLACK BANDIT”,8,1:
POKE40248,89:POKE40249,10:RUN:
Less obvious controls:
* JOYSTICK DOWN 2 SECONDS: search your current position for an item
* JOYSTICK UP + FIRE: select an item to use at position (if applicable) and then press U
* SPACE: change weapon
* D: on bottom panel, see score, power, room name
* L: on bottom panel, see items in inventory
* I: on bottom panel, see biography of next boss.
The game also checks for RETURN and number keys, but they don’t actually do anything.
Anyway, with all this in mind, it may be easier to figure out what to do. In fact, you can complete the game! (Although the ending is probably no more than 3/10.)
Thats awesome! Thanks Professor Chaos!! I’ll give that a go this weekend. Formatting looks spot on too :)
Hi,
Wow.. what a surprise to see my old game :) My name is Kristian Larsen, I’m from Denmark, and I am the guy who did the graphics and the game story back in 1987-1988 when I was 19 years old. The coding was done by Robert Torp (also from Denmark, and I guess about 17 years old at that time) whom I meet through a Danish computer magazine. I could not do any kind of programming at that time, but Robert could do a little – and he really learned a lot during this project. We made a complete finished game, and when done we mailed a demo version to several “computer game companies”. We got in contact with someone in UK, and Robert took the ferry from Denmark to UK, and then to London to meet these guys. Unfortunately it all ended here… I am sorry to tell that the full game does not exist anymore, at this time of writing it is 29 years ago we made it, so it has disappeared, and I lost contact to Robert Torp in the years that followed. However, it is so funny to see the game again, thanks for your effort to preserve this kind of work from an “old” computer world. Best regards, Kristian