A very famous game worldwide, featuring up to 4 players who go around and simply bomb each other. Even almost banned by some countries, including Ireland who condemned the idea after saying that kids could be encouraged to blow each other up. In the end, it was only the control pads that blew up after constant playing.
The Dynablaster (More well known as Bomberman around the world) revolution was widely spread, and was planned for the C64 back in 1991/92 by Ubi-Soft (Or Hudson Soft Germany). There were brief mentions in the pages of Commodore Format, but nothing was ever seen again on the title, apart from the annoying blip on the scanner which never seemed to move any closer to the center.
Nothing could be found, until recently on the Lemon forum, it was brought to the attention of other sceners about the possibility of Dynablaster being on the C64, and they submitted an Advert which mentions the C64 as one of 3 machines being catered for. (But no Spectrum or Amstrad versions were mentioned).
Not a lot to go on, but it showed certainly that Ubi-soft had their sights set on a C64 conversion being done. Just how far the conversion got was unknown. Then suddenly Dominic Bode brought to GTW’s attention some crucial information which gave the credits above… Mathias Reichert (Code) and Alexander Meyer (Graphics) were linked as the developers. Not fully confirmed at that point, but it was a start…
Part of the mystery deepened when it was found that Mighty Brain in Commodore Format answered a question in around 1992/93 about the game’s whereabouts and said that it suffered “distribution problems”. Of course, Mighty Brain was the task of one of the staff members each month… It seems that this wasn’t the case anyway… Read on…
Now the plot begins to thicken, and a story evolves…. Just recently, Karl Kuras kindly informed GTW that some C64 screenshots were printed in a German magazine called “Play Time”. After a request, Pohli from the Lemon 64 forum had kindly dug up the shots from the magazine with help from a neighbour and now GTW can show what the game was looking like on the C64. This confirmed that GTW are now officially searching for a C64 conversion… and possibly one which is nearly complete.
Well, research from another GTW reader (Hank, in the forums) brought the interesting possibility that the music was in fact in HVSC. Looking under Various/Remo… and dated 1991/1992 Hudson Soft, could it be? Was Sven Appel the official musician for the game? GTW attempted to find out and we managed to get in touch with Sven, who confirmed that these were indeed for the official conversion by Hudson Soft Germany. All credits have now been also confirmed!
Sven tells GTW…
“Well, i can tell you that this conversion was never released. I made the music conversion and lots of sprite graphics. The two player battle mode was almost finished. But the game was never released. We made it for Hudson Soft Germany. I don’t have any code left. Only musics and graphics.”
Expanding on this, we asked Sven about the possibility of digging out the graphics, which he has agreed to do in the future. There isn’t anything playable, but could that be next? We still need to track down Matthias, which is proving tricky so far. But at the very least we could be seeing a slideshow of how the game looked.
The game was confirmed as incomplete, and was cancelled due to the dwindling C64 market, which Hudson Soft Germany saw and decided to act on. They concentrated on the Amiga version, which did get released in time. The C64 version is sadly still mentioned in the manual and on the back cover (as being a 3 player max game). It is a tease of what could have been had the game been completed a bit quicker perhaps.
So… GTW is looking now for a game which was around 70% complete we believe. Screenshots show that it looks playable at least, and we now have something to search for… thanks to all those involved in researching for this game though!…
Will it be found?… Time will tell…
Contributions: Dominic Bode, Andrew Fisher, Karl Kuras, Pohli, Hank, Sven Appel, Jazzcat
Supporting content
Available downloads
- amiga-manual (pdf)
- Music_Dynablaster.zip (zip)
Gallery
Creator speaks
Mathias Reichert:
“I was only doing the C64 version of Dynablaster. It was developed on an Amiga with a cross assembler. The game was in Alpha state when it got cancelled.
The source is on my old A2000 which I haven’t used for more than 20 years, I think…”
Update history
30/06/14 – Mathias Reichert confirms his involvement and added Creator Speaks.
Poor Dynablaster.
I have to agree with Rafal. I was going to post
“Although this is a sad loss, Had it not been Missing In Action, perhaps the exquisite (and it is exquisite) ‘Bomberland’ would not exist.
‘ Bomberland ‘ is truly sublime and arguably better than all the original versions of ‘ Bomberman / Dynablaster ‘.
Yeah, that is true – Bomberland is something very special and far better than what we would have got in 1992. For me, its just the curiosity to see what it could have been like back in the day – part of the fun of finding many of the prototypes, or even the completely different builds.
How good or bad was it compared to other versions released? etc.
That music was awful, “bomberland” clone is probably much beyond what could hudson soft create in 1992.