A neat little platformer this one, and something I fondly remember playing from the days of Zzap 64 and their famous megatapes.
Created by Zach Townsend (coder of Batman The Movie and Army Moves) after he had left Ocean, Dreamraider was produced by himself within his new Technodream team and started writing the game in the hope of later finding a publisher.
You control a creature similar to the frog in Nebulus, where you collect coins, and shoot various other creatures around a huge play-area, jump up trees and go down into deep caves etc. It featured good parallax, the graphics were average but the game played well overall.
In fact, when the demo was given away with Zzap 64 (issue 75), it came with a rather intriguing storyline about having to jump into a mad scientist’s dreams to prevent them developing a weapon that could destroy 90% of human life. The scenario, enemies and more would be generated from that scientist’s mind. See scans for more details about this.
After an interview with Zach in Commodore Zone back around 1999, it was found that only the one level was ever made (with a small bit of level two started), then the game was binned as Technodream fell apart. However, the Zzap demo page suggested that level two was virtually completed by Joe.
Zach went on to work on Stun Runner, followed by the doomed Race Drivin’. We may see glimpses of level two someday soon, though Zach informed GTW that he gave all his stuff to his brother, who may have long since sold or binned the disks by now. Tracking bits of level two is highly unlikely.
A nice little platformer, which may have done well…
Contributions: Zach Townsend, Stephen Stuttard (scans) and Iain Black (for TAP + tape scans)
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Preview_DreamRaider (zip)
Gallery
Update history
- 25/07/21 – Added some scans and TAP from Megatape.
- 23/01/21 – Tidied up the piece a bit.
I discovered this game on the flip side of a disk I bought in 1992. I thought it was fun enough. Good animation, interesting background design, if a little crowded at times.
It was a tad on the difficult side. But I really wanted to see what more would come; after playing a couple times, I realised it was just a demo.
– Jodo Kast
Thanks for the memories Jodo – it was quite a huge demo overall, which is quite surprising. If you can turn some cheats on, there is a lot to the map. Unfortunately no more was ever done to it – I think at the point it was put out on Zzap’s covermount, they had already abandoned it according to Zach.