Mentioned as a future title from Linel in Your Commodore issue 73, Necronom was a R-Type clone which saw eventual release on the Commodore Amiga back in 1991 by Linel and later on Amiga Fun magazine around 1992/93.
The game got mixed reviews, with Amiga Format slating it – but Amiga Power’s Stuart Campbell loving it and finding it a good stop gap after playing R-Type 2.
So what of the C64 game? Well, as you can expect… Linel never mentioned a conversion again for the C64 and no screenshots or anything ever surfaced. In 1992, Linel/Genias released Catalypse, but that was it.
Contributor ‘Nemo’, found a review of the Amiga/ST game in a Greek magazine called ‘Computer Games’ in April 1992, which reviewed the game and also stated a C64 release on the formats list. Seems very likely therefore that something must have been started!
The Amiga credits list a familiar name – Michael Tschögl … so did he do the music, and did Andrea Pompili by chance also code this before Catalypse? … Well, not quite! After porting a series of disks for Darren Melbourne, C64.com passed these onto us and we got to work checking the contents.
On one of the disks was a graphical slideshow from Chris Edwards, who worked for Pantheon Software (who did titles such as Superkid). A good few screens were from an aborted conversion of Necronom (as well as a loading screen), so we can confirm that Pantheon Software were behind a conversion.
So what happened to their conversion?….. Did it get far? Hopefully we will get to learn more soon from Chris Edwards about the development and if anything happened to survive. We believe that it never got much further than the concept artwork.
Contributions: Nemo, Darren Melbourne, C64.com
