A short entry for another seemingly lost Commodore 64 title called Hårsfjärden. The game seems to involve you using a helicopter to repel submarines by dropping depth charges nearby, but without hitting. Hårsfjärden is a fjard south of Stockholm in Sweden where a submarine hunt took place in the early 1980s.
The game was developed by two brothers, Pierre and Robert Sandboge and the two were interviewed in issue 1 of Min Hemdator in 1983 (see scans). A small article was done in 2014 which is worth a read too.
Pierre Sandboge talks about this game in the limited edition 2016 book “Svensk videospelsutveckling. Från 50-tal till 90-tal” (Swedish video game development. ’50s to ’90s) by Sunhede and Lindell.
In 1983, Pierre gets in touch with Swedish publisher Handic to ask whether they’d like to publish his games for the VIC 20. Quote from the book:
“The relationship with Handic leads to Pierre and his brother Robert being asked to make a game for the Commodore 64 when it is launched in 1983 [in Sweden]. Since submarine incidents are a hot topic at the time they want the game to be named Hårsfjärden, after the waters where submarine hunts have taken place during October 1982.
A C64 cartridge may contain either 8 or 16 kb and they start developing the game with the maximum amount of memory in mind. Hårsfjärden is demonstrated at the Nordiska Mikrodatormässan (Nordic Microcomputer Expo) in 1983 and is by then almost completely finished.
But Handic gets cheap for some reason and wants the game to fit into the cheaper 8 Kb cart. The brothers try to compress the code, but are not successful enough and the game is sadly cancelled in the end. Despite this, it can still be found in some price lists.”
It looks like the game was close to being finished – so can it be preserved? Hopefully with the names known – we’ll see this game in the future.
Contributions: Henrik Lindgren, Archive.org, Anonymous Contributor
