A game which was mentioned in Zzap issue 49 on page 3, coming soon on the Amiga, Atari ST and C64. A few mentions were done of the game across a few issues, but sadly nothing was to ever surface.
Thanks to Brendan Phoenix, here is a scan from Commodore User which shows the Amiga version at least (see gallery).
As you might guess, the game has you flying around the Mars terrain, but with a Afterburner’esq viewpoint with your ship travelling along the surface and in space. Perhaps it may even be closer to SEGA’s Galaxy Force, which was released around the same time – was that a major inspiration perhaps?
Magazines revealed that Mars Cops was to be a 3-phase space shoot-em-up which involved you chasing down UFOs in space and trenches, before a lunar landing style sequence to round things off. However, mentions of a C64 version would tail off very quickly and we don’t believe that there was a serious conversion underway.
More details of the game on other formats and its troubled development can be read on our main page. Essentially, there were multiple delays, resulting in the developer leaving at the end and Arcana collapsing in 1990.
Do you know anything more about a potential C64 conversion?
Artist Ian Harling got in touch and mentioned that there was no work carried out on any 8-bit versions as far as he was aware. It seems therefore that it was a mistake in Zzap, and was only intended for 16-bit platforms.
With a huge thank you to Jason Lethert for all his gathering of materials from magazines to help with research and also Stephen Stuttard for creating the scans.
Contributions: Brendan Phoenix, Jason Lethert, Stephen Stuttard, Ian Harling, Adam Huemer
Text should say “and was only intended for 16-bit platforms.”
Thanks Adam! Just fixed :)