A game which was in development by the same developers who did Mortal Dogfight and Chaos Lands, Coma Software.
It’s very early days yet for this title, with little information being known about the actual game. The only thing we actually know is that the game was never completed due to other interests taking up development time.
In the end the game was cancelled.
However, recently Jazzcat uncovered some screens from the game, including the main character and various screens which would have been used. We have recently added the slideshow to run on the real thing.
It seems the game would have possiblity been a kind of Maniac Mansion SCUMM-style of game, but we are merely speculating at the moment.
Thanks to a contributor… we learn that in Hungary there was a C64 Magazine called CoV (Commodore Világ – ‘Világ’ meaning World). The mag’s mailing section was done by CoVboy who had a very good sense of humor and style, it’s likely that he is the main character in the game. In the magazine was always an illustration about him or his cow. You can check a collection of them (there was a special issue just containing some of these illustrations) at this address: http://pcvilag.muskatli.hu/ irodalom/CoV/GettoV/gettov. html
So we now know the background to the game, and that it was built around this particular Hungarian character.
As for the game, do you know more about it and could there be something playable to find?…
More to come soon hopefully…
Contributions: Jazzcat, Morgan
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Preview_Covboy.zip (zip)
Gallery
Creator speaks
Gergely Viktor speaks to GTW about work on Covboy's Quest...
"After I finished working on Mortal Dogfight, I felt myself enough brave to start developing a game in my favourite game-type, an RPG-strategy. Chaoslands was a remake, to be honest, as Mortal Dogfight aswell, but I'm not ashamed, because I did the job after a long learning curve from the first bytes to the last in pure assembly language.
I had to mention this, because I would like to greet the original games creators. The only problem that I forgot what were the titles of the original games. The reason for making remakes was my poor imagination, i loved coding and i felt that if i could make such a good game than the old one was I would be glad.
And I tried. In the meantime I had to concentrate on my work as a computer teacher in various schools, so I stopped developing the game. I started some small businesses, like Playstation-PC playrooms, then a pub in my hometown, finished my study at the university in informatics and finally established a family, where I have a 3 years old son. Due to these Chaoslands was never finished, the version you have is the latest one.
I've read about CoVboy's Quest on your website. The informations you published are clearly right, but I would like to ask that where the hell did you get these informations about CoVboy from? :-) It was another suprise for me. And I don't remember that I gave those pictures pixelized by me to anyone, because it was just an idea back in 1993, previous to Mortal Dogfight. But I was glad to see these on your website, I felt myself as an artist who is mentioned somewhere before his death. :-) So CoVboy's quest was in a very early development stage and I think it's the end for it as well. But if you let it remain on your website, it would be a honour for me.
After almost 10 years of lacking of coding, I'm coming back to game development. In my future plans there is a lot of things, because I started learning actionscript programming 2 years ago and now I'm just working on some titles. Unfortunately these are not targeting C64, but various mobile phones, like Nokia, Sony Ericcson, etc. During developing for these little and limited devices, I feel myself like in the good old times when I was coding on my c64 all night.
My and my friend's (named Control/Digital on the c64 scene) other target is iPhone, where I'm in an earlier stage and the learning curve is obviously longer, but the direction is game development aswell. I would like to port my old finished and unfinished games to these platforms aswell, so I hope you will hear about me and Coma Software House again."
Gergely Viktor.
