This is in fact what would become Hard ‘N’ Heavy, the unofficial sequel to Giana Sisters. Well, it was actually once the OFFICIAL sequel to Giana before Nintendo had stepped in. Many of us learnt about the sequel in the UK thanks to Ian Osborne’s unreleased games feature in Commodore Force magazine.
Originally it was to be titled “Giana 2 – Arthur and Martha in Future World”, the game was to feature the famous twosome from the first game and was well underway until Nintendo came by and put a stop to the first game.
Attempting to break away from its “Mario” link, the theme and characters of the game were changed. It’s still a sort of Super Mario Bros clone, but far less obvious. The game was renamed to Hard ‘N’ Heavy, and had two futuristic robot sprites with overlays as Arthur and Martha replacements.
Although the game was released in Germany and other areas, the game never saw release in the UK. GO! / U.S. Gold were likely scared off from the commotion with Giana Sisters.
Hard ‘N’ Heavy can be downloaded from within these archives. Essentially it is exactly the same game was what would have been Giana 2, but without the Giana sprites which you can see in early previews of the game and within the gallery section! There may possibly be some other minor changes as well.
So what about the Giana version of the game with the Giana sprites? Possibly with not only a name/sprite change, but potentially also levels and titles, GTW hopes to try and find the remains of the game before it turned into Hard ‘N’ Heavy and obtain what looks like the screenshots we have here.
Recently GTW was helped out by Stefan Lindberg, who uncovered the artist who created the front cover for Giana 2. This seems to have been done before the game was changed to Hard and Heavy. Check it out in the scans section!
Can you help us find this version?
Contributions: Andrew Fisher, Stadium 64, Stefan Lindberg, Ian Osborne, C64.com, Andreas Escher, Ross Sillifant, Archive.org
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Game_HardNHeavy (zip)
Gallery
Update history
- 07/12/24 – Fixed Ian Osborne’s surname. How many times have I got this wrong?? Sorry Ian!
- 24/09/24 – Added advert scan thanks to archive.org
- 17/09/24 – Hi-res scan screenshot added thanks to Stephen Stuttard.
- 29/12/16 – Scan added thanks to Ross Sillifant
- 05/05/15 – Credit fix thanks to Andreas Escher
totally agreed, it is VERY good game and nice soundtrack!
also the amiga version is very good, it has been made slightly easier.
Hard ‘n’ Heavy is one of the most underrated games on the C64. Great music, many interesting platforming concepts, more so than in Giana. It had a few glitches and maybe was rushed a bit, but other than that it should be considered as one of the best c64 platformers.
It had actually two things I never saw in other c64 games made before it: 1. Checkpoint is at when you are reaching a certain object (blue terminal), not when you reach an X coord position like Mario or Giana (became the norm later on with platformers), 2. Demo with playing the level (was in Mario and many Arcade games, but I don’t remember any on C64 prior).