D-Day was advertised in various magazines of the era, and was released on the Spectrum and Sinclair QL, though a Commodore 64 edition was also advertised as coming soo.
The game involved battling through 4 separate scenarios, either taking control of Allied or German soldiers, in one or two player war game action. The game was quoted to be more of a “Tactical challenge” than your typical “boring arcade game”. It was set during the Normandy landings of 1944, where players take German and Allied sides through a 63 unit scrolling map.
Unfortunately we were never blessed with the C64 conversion, and for years it wasn’t known exactly how far the game had got. An advert was all that we had, and the only real mention of the C64 edition was when it was spotted at the “LET 1985” event, mentioned in Home Computing Weekly, 26th Feb 1985. Did the guys from HCW see something of a C64 conversion, or just the Spectrum game?
Well, after nothing really left to go on – contributor Jeff Hayes kindly got in touch with Games That Weren’t after finding his Sinclair QL edition of the game by chance. Whilst reporting about his finding to a QL forum group, on the back Jeff noticed that there was a C64 screenshot of the game along with the QL edition. Upon looking for more details, he came across this very page and got in touch via the comments.
Although QL credits were printed in the manual, the C64 credits were missing, and no mention of the C64 edition appears in the manual. Perhaps the box was produced earlier, and by this point there were issues with the C64 edition?
For now, we have listed the C64 credits as the same as the QL ones, until they can be confirmed otherwise. It is the first decent lead we have had for the title, and the display of a screenshot gives us hope that something can be found and preserved – even though the QL team were unfortunately using aliases. Certainly as you can see, it isn’t vapourware.
If you know anything more or can help us find those potentially involved, please get in touch.
Contributions: Dumbflag, Jeff Hayes
A c64 version was shown on the back of a Games Workshop box, with a Sticker on the front for Sinclair QL. The rear of the box shows a screen shot for the c64 and QL, plus technical details for each version. So to reduce costs they had planned to share the retail packaging.
The box is shown on the Sinclair QL forum.
Ah that’s fantastic, thank you very much for the heads up! I’ll get the page updated shortly with credit to yourself.