We all know about the famous Dan Dare game by Virgin on the C64 with its excellent Comic Book style gameplay. Even now the game is quite brilliant and hasn’t aged badly at all.
In speaking with Andy Wilson recently, it was discovered that there is actually a missing first part to the game, and that Dan Dare was to be in two parts in total (The released game being the second part). According to Andy, one of the main magazines of the time leaked a screenshot of Part 1, which had the entire game crew dressed in space suits. Peter Weighill has found the shots, and infact an entire article which we have added above as a download link!
We learn that the first part involves Dan Dare having to disable some satelites whilst in his space suit. A few of the shots seem to depict Dan Dare flying around in space and deactivating some satelites, whilst avoiding the Mekon’s henchmen. Digby is captured which leads onto the adventure part which we all know very well.
We have included the other two screenshots of the adventure part, as look carefully at the main sprite!!… It’s a hi-res version of Dan Dare rather than the multicoloured version we had in the final version.
More details about the actual missing part is sketchy at present, though hopefully Andy will help shed a bit more light soon – maybe even dig out some maps and other bits related to it. At present we know that Andy sadly does not have the game any more… so we may have to rely on others from the Gang of Five to help dig out any remains. We shall see!
Can this missing part be found?…
Contributions: Andy Wilson, Peter Weighill
As a huge Dan Dare fan (Eagle comics wise) i loved the C64 original and 2nd game was’nt half bad either, less said about the bloody 3rd the better :-(
I’d love for the missing section to be found 1 day.Fingers crossed.