Fruit Fight is an interesting entry which was to be an unofficial arcade conversion of Dingo (Ultimate Arcade)
The game was quite a good copy according to Stephen Kellett (the game’s coder). The game was written for Gannon Designs who also did Pacland and The Tube on the C64. Sadly Martin Gannon got Motor Nuerone Disease and passed away. According to Stephen, Martin was a larger than life guy with an enormous ego but had funny ideas about how you do business. He thought that you could swear to other business people in meetings and that that was acceptable. As a result he got rubbish deals from people for their conversions.
Martin had a deal for Fruit Fight which was rubbish, but it would have been profitable (just) compared to what it had cost to write. Rather than cover his costs, Martin told the people behind the deal to stick it even though he had nowhere else to sell it. Had Martin agreed, he may well have kept Gannon Designs running a few months longer in 1988.
When the liquidators came in, they took everything and held everything of Fruit Fight. For fun, Stephen wrote an IBM PC AT version during his lunch hour in his next job and at home in the evenings he wrote Fruit Fight for the Atari ST.
We may not be able to release anything of Fruit Fight, and Stephen certainly cannot allow us to. It will be down to us finding another source of the game, which we hope might be possible. Who knows!
But this sounds like an awesome conversion we simply must find!
Can we find it?…
Contributions: Stephen Kellett
Supporting content
Creator speaks
Stephen Kellett talks to GTW64 about his game:
“Wrote 5 versions of the arcade game Dingo for the C64, BBC B, Acorn Electron, Atari 400 and Commodore 16 – the clones were called “Fruit Fight”. Wrote music engine for the company. The company web bust in February (we didn’t get any pay for 1988). The games were never released because the liquidator would not allow it.
I later wrote Motorola 68000 and Intel 80286 versions of Fruit Fight on the Atari ST and IBM PC-AT (the latter in my lunch hour at work) to prove I could write 32 bit and 16 bit assembly language. Back then practically no one could afford a 386 – only the manager had one (status symbol) and he had no use for it.”
