Another game for the archives, this time a title mentioned by Mat Allen, and a game by Melbourne House.
This game was briefly mentioned in some magazines and a few adverts were printed. The game actually surfaced on the Spectrum (http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0001636) and Amstrad and got reasonable to average reviews.
Enterprise is a kind of Elite clone of sorts, but lacking on a lot of the features of the great Firebird game and doesn’t look like it would have made a too painful translation to the C64. But for reasons still unknown, the game never made it anyway.
It is the classic tale on the C64 normally of games not making the transition as the C64 was a little on the crap side at doing vector based games (Without all the tricks that we see today). What is the betting that this is another casulty of the Vector game translation problem on the C64?
Well, we spoke to Tim Ansell, who confirms that he wrote 5 versions in total. His brother did the box/advert artwork. Tim wrote versions for the Amstrad CPC464, Spectrum, Atari 800, C64 and then PC (Tandy + EGA) in that exact order. He couldn’t recall why some of the versions never saw release. It is plausible that poor sales of the Amstrad/Spectrum editions meant that Melbourne House decided not to release the others?
We hope that maybe Tim will be able to find something of the C64 version, so that it can be preserved – but it means crucially that there is a full game to find some day! Lets hope it can be recovered before any media deteriorates too much.
Contributions: Mat Allen, Peter Weighill, Leszek Chmielewski, Brendan Phoenix, Tim Ansell
I had it on PC (bootable floppy) and have been trying to find another copy of it for years with no luck.
Issue 27 of Zzap, page 71 has a small preview. Confirms it is due mid July (issue was from June)
Thanks Brendan, adding now! :)