Ah, the days when Ocean churned out many a movie/tv licence which was utter tripe eh?… Well, 1986 was a popular year mainly for some real stinkers such as Highlander, V and also Knight Rider. All of which were heavily delayed and when they eventually turned up, you’d wonder where all the time was spent – certainly not making a great game anyway!
In true tribute fashion to the “classic” game, Christian Widmann decided to enter a spoof sequel into the 2006 Crap Gaming Compo after much nagging by a fellow C64 scener on IRC. The game would have eventually gone onto a Cronosoft Cassette 50 compilation for charity, but unfortunatly some users took the competition too seriously and critisized things for being too leniant on rules. The runner of the competition had enough and sadly eventually closed the competition down.
Knight Rider 2 however got quite far and was coming on very well, probably a bit too well as it began to look like a fairly good little game in its own right with some good graphics and great music. However the game never quite made the planned deadline due a bug which took Christian ages to fix. After that, the developer got bored with the game and decided to do some more GBA based work instead.
Christian recalled…”Code, graphics and especially the “gameplay” is terrible, just as it was supposed to be. MTR’s redition of the original theme is way too good, I did the rest in a couple of nights while drinking cheap sangria and watching the original series on DVD, to get in the right Hoff mood. I’m quite proud of the sprites for the other cars, I did them in about 5 minutes (including saving them to disk!) and they look just perfect, like a 5-year-old would draw them. 8-) ”
In the end the game came with a great little introduction sequence, a loading screen in typical Ocean style and a semi playable game (Well, you can move your car and avoid other cars!). The game puts you in an Outrun style perspective, with a simple road effect … but the strange thing is that the game is actually more playable than Cisco Heat! :-)
It’s a shame it wasn’t fully completed, thanks to Christian you can now check out what might have been!….
Case closed…
Contributions: Christian Widmann, Shaun Bebbington
