Games That Weren't 64^®

Originally we thought this was a vapourware title briefly mentioned in the news pages of Zzap Italia back in 1988, but Strident did some impressive digging and found that the game did exist and was to be released on the Destiny publishing label. See http://8bitag.com/info/stbrides.html for more details.

The game was a graphic text adventure being produced by the St. Brides development team and was actually completed. It was based on a poem by Marc Peirson, who also did the poem that White Feather Cloak was based upon. Here is what Marc had to say to 8bitag.com:

“As to King, again this was just a bit of fun I wrote based on a drawing that a school friend mine had done of a shaggy monster type wearing a badge that said ‘king’. The friend’s name was Harry Venning, who you may know of as the cartoonist in Stage magazine and the writer of the Claire in the Community radio show. Francis Lee optioned [King] to do a computer game based on it – and that again was the last of my involvement and knowledge of it really. I didn’t know it had been made into a game eventually.”

Destiny had done a deal with Activision at the time to publish their games, which explains why Activision has been linked to the title. It seemed the game had been development for some while, but when things fell through with Destiny, the game would never be released. We have added the artwork as shown on http://8bitag.com/ , which was intended for the cover art and is copyrighted to Francis Lee.

Eventually it was established by contributor Strident that the game would eventually surface via GI Games under the title of The Dogboy, matching the name of one of the characters in the story. Considering that Tim Gilberts converted many of St. Brides’ games, we wonder if he was also involved on this one too. Maybe something of the C64 version could be found?

Contributions: Luca Bertoldi, Fabrizio Bartoloni, Strident

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