Seems to be a good constant stream at the moment of unreleased C64 games surfacing, and going well into July 2020 – Simon Quernhorst got in touch with GTW64 to let us know that this early platformer had been recovered. It was thanks to the recent recovery of Joust which would inspire Henrik Matzen to dig out the game to add to the archives.
“The preview has been in my possession since the early 90’ies when I visited Kim Sørensen’s place and borrowed some of his old C64 disks and made a copy of “Shitty Preview”, as it was called on the disk. :-)
I always knew I had it, but never thought of it as being anything important, until recently when I saw the amazing story about how ‘Joust’ was found and recovered, and I thought maybe ‘Fighting Survivor’ could also be interesting for a ‘Games That Weren’t’ even it was really a early preview. Luckily I am still actively using my C64 (+Amigas) today for demo and games on authentic hardware, so I already secured and transferred all my disks to .D64 about 15+ years ago.”
Henrik is the cousin of artist Kim Sørensen, who informed Henrik that the coder and himself went to the UK for a while and stayed in London. Initially they had a meeting with Mirrorsoft to present the game, but had a power outage and lost a lot of the animation work. As a result, they quickly borrowed the leg sprites from Hawkeye. They were late to the Mirrorsoft meeting, who told Kim and Charles to come back another day. Instead they signed up a deal with Grandslam Entertainment to release. Unfortunately the game was never completed, for reasons we hope to find out soon.
All that seems to be left is the early preview that we have here, sadly with no enemies or gameplay – you can just move the main character around at this stage. It did however get a lot further than this, so it is hoped that something more may miraculously surface to be shared. Kim however suggests that all other copies are now lost.
For now, check out this intriguing and early preview of another piece of C64 history.
Contributions: Henrik Matzen, Simon Quernhorst
