Many people who grew up in the 1980’s and the UK will remember the late Bob Monkhouse, who was the game show and comedy king for many decades. He was so famous, that not even the C64 could escape his face.
Bob’s Full House was part of a series of game show adaptations on the C64 and was developed by Binary Design for Domark in 1988.
It was recovery of a series of Charles Deenen tunes in 2014, which first game the suggestion that there was a different version of the game in existence. GTW had missed the A&D reference in the music demos though…
Come August 2015, GTW picked up the disks of Ashley Routledge to preserve. When flipping through quickly with Ash and Dave, they pull out a disk labelled “Bob’s Full House gfx disk” and come out with “Wow, I had forgotten all about that one! Never got too far!”
Basically, pretty might straight after Double Dragon was completed for Binary Design, they were offered the chance to work on Bob’s Full House. They agreed, and made a small start – getting Charles Deenen signed up to do music as well after his recent work on Double Dragon. However, a week or so of work – the duo were not really feeling it for the game and were getting pretty bored of it. Ash says that they decided to walk away from the production and go onto other more interesting titles instead.
Unfortunately it seems that anything that may have been executable has been lost – this is one backup from Dave that Ash never had. However, all of Ash’s work on the game can be found here for the first time – showing some cool looking graphics for the game, which is VERY different to the eventual release. There is a small character routine, which we believe was developed for the game – but this was it!
A cool glimpse at what could have been a neat early Ash and Dave game.
Contributions: Ashley Routledge, Dave Saunders
This one takes me back, I remember playing the Spectrum version when I had two broken wrists. Never knew that guys as classy and gifted as Ash & Dave would’ve been involved in something so workmanlike, but I guess they had bills to pay.