Games That Weren't 64^®

You may be shocked to know, but there were two versions of Crystal Castles in development – both before the U.S. Gold release in later years.

Atarisoft were doing an official conversion themselves back in the early 80’s of Crystal Castles that didn’t get released, but there was in fact another version developed a little earlier by a company called Thundervision, which is the focus of this post.

Around the time of the Atarisoft game – a company called Thundervision worked on what was believed to be an unofficial conversion. Kurt Woloch informed GTW that he read a story from the programmer that the Thundervision game wasn’t made to get the licence to sell, and hence was leaked to the community to play. This was a few years before U.S. Gold released the game in the UK, but would have been around a similar time that Atarisoft could have released their version.

It suggests that the leak of the Thundervision game could have been the key reason why the completed Atarisoft game didn’t make it beyond prototype release stage, though the company itself had collapsed around that time anyway.

Another source suggests that an Australian programmer did the game and offered it to Atari, but were turned down and as a result leaked the 99% complete version underground. Was this the case?

On the Lemon64 forums, a “Jim” laid claim as to being someone who worked on the game, along with someone called Jon. In Gamebase, there is another “Thundervision” title from a year earlier, which lists the developer as a Jim Larsen. Hopefully we can speak to Jim soon to learn more about what happened exactly, or if Jim sees this – please do get in touch.

Unfortunately, it has been highlighted that the Thundervision edition of the game crashes at the end, so it isn’t possible to play the final level properly. We don’t believe that there is a version out there which fixes the issue. Does anyone fancy trying to fix it for posterity and create a 100% working version of the game?

For now, check out the original version from Atarisoft, and compare against this superior Thundervision version.

Contributions: Mat Allen, Charles Haley, Kurt Woloch, Grinder, Rob Moss

Supporting content

• Downloads
• Gallery
• Creator speaks

Available downloads

• Game_CrystalcastlesV1 (zip)

Gallery

Creator speaks

Jim (Unknown surname) speaks about work we believe on the Thundervision version (nabbed from Lemon64)….

“I am one of the authors of this game. I did music and half the field research (we had to play the game to the end in the arcade, and photograph every screen!) It is very flattering to hear the stories about who we are (Jim and Jon). So far, no one is right! Live long and prosper. By the way, that’s not our cover art!”