Boxing Manager was a fairly standard management affair which was released on the C64 back around 1987/88 and which seemed to be popular enough for the management mad company D&H to release a sequel. However, although mention in various adverts, the sequel never surfaced on the C64 even though it did on the Spectrum.
Recently Gary Pearson got in touch with GTW and shared the following:
“Some time back in the 80s (probably about 1988 at a guess) I submitted a tech demo to D&H to prove my coding competence which they accepted and sent me a contract to convert Boxing Manger 2 along with the Spectrum version. I loaded up the Spectrum version and realized the game was total rubbish. Even though it was written in basic and probably could have been converted in a week or so if i stuck with basic I just didn’t like the game and never even started it.
Sorry its not a found game but I guess its one that can be crossed off the list unless they found another programmer to do it.”
So we can confirm that there was indeed plans for the conversion – but did anyone else pick it up? … Now unless i’m getting very confused somewhere, the main boxing scene looks *very* familiar to a screenshot that i’ve seen in one of the big C64 magazines. Was it Zzap 64?…. Therefore the game may well have been reviewed or covered in some way on the C64. Well, after some research my mind wasn’t playing tricks, but the game was actually reviewed by Commodore Format in issue 26. The scan can be found here.
We can tell that it is the C64 version due to the colours in the screenshots and tones, so did this ever get released, or did D&H go under just before it got out of the door?….
Well, thanks to Sean O’Neill, the game has been spotted on the Retro Collector website and we can now confirm it was released on the C64 and is just to be preserved in time. It seems that the D&H game was released a few years earlier, and Cult got someone to do a C64 conversion for their budget label, but as it was a late release – there were likely limited sales.
John Christian Lønningdal very kindly has preserved the copy that he found and has allowed us to add it onto the site. So finally the game is now fully preserved for posterity!
Case closed!
Contributions: Gary Pearson, Sean O'Neill, John Christian Lønningdal
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Game_Boxingmanager2 (zip)
Gallery
Update history
- 20/11/14 – Game added to the website thanks to John Christian Lønningdal
- 06/11/14 – Game confirmed as existing thanks to Sean O’Neill
