Wow, the list of unreleased Codemasters titles for the Commodore 64 continues to grow, and grow it does with the inclusion now of Firehawk.
This time a game again by Finlay Munro which was mentioned recently in a conversation. He mentioned about working on a NES port of a top down 8-way scroller. It was likely to have been his last bit of C64 work (either that or Captain Dynamo 2 which we found).
After a bit of digging around, we found that the game was a conversion of Firehawk (see above). The game was believed to have been completed, but not released due to the market shrinking too much and Codemasters pulling out.
The game was done through Reflective Design, and recently in 2013 – Duncan Kershaw managed to recover a level 1 map from the game. Duncan suggests that he has seen the game up and running, so hopefully we will see more. You can now check out the C64 graphics for yourself as well as download the map which is embedded into the Reflective Designs editor (used for Bubble Dizzy, DJ Puff etc). There is also the note file that came with the graphics which can be ran via SYS 2064 (Thanks Vinny Mainolfi!)
Finlay has said that he will go through his disks at some point, as he never threw anything away. Firehawk should well be coming to GTW64 at some point in the future!
Watch this space!
Contributions: Finlay Munro, Duncan Kershaw, Vinny Mainolfi
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Assets_Firehawk (zip)
Gallery
Creator speaks
Finlay talks to GTW64 about Firehawk:
“Reminded me of yet another unreleased one I did, at the opposite end of the C64s lifetime. It was for codemasters, and was a NES port. Had you flying around on a top down 8 way scroller, shooting out the landscape.You’d shoot a bit of it, and it would expand out and incrementally take out lots of the surrounding landscape. Was one of the last C64 game I did. That or Dynamo. Once again I cant remember the name apart from it had ‘Fox’ in it somewhere.
That’s all I’ve got I’m afraid!
Some day I’ll get around to looking at my disks. I have them all – never throw anything out, much to my wifes disgust. But first I have to find them. I’d imagine they’ll all be unreadable by now anyway, wherever they are.”
Then after we mention about it being Firehawk…
“Wow! Good detective work there! 99% sure it was Firehawk. The only little bit of uncertainty is that the screenshot looks like there’s a side scrolly bit in it, and I certainly didn’t do any of that. It was purely top down.
It was done through a company called Reflective Design. Run by Duncan Kershaw and Jez..I forget his last name.
I’ll certainly let you know when I eventually stumble across my disks. I should be ok with the 3 1/2 inchers, but the 5 1/4 ones..I know I’ve still go a few physical drives, but I dont know if I’ve got a pc old enough to connect them to now. Apart from the very early games, I cross compiled them on PC, and stored them on 3 1/2.”
