Paddle Mania was an arcade tennis game which was mentioned as being a title for conversion in Commodore User, September 1988 by French software company FIL.
UK representatives of FIL were The Sales Curve – but although Silkworm and Ninja Warriors made it … this didn’t.
FIL later lost funding, so its possible that Sales Curve went their own way and decided not to convert this game. This was the last we knew about the game. According to The Games Machine, paddlemania was to be released as part of a double pack, with Nikki The Radical Ninja, rather than a stand alone release – so we’re not sure if that was true or not?
However, in 2011 after C64.com converted some disks from Darren Melbourne – we found a music demo which had a huge set of tunes by David Whittaker – and quite good ones too! …. We made some recordings of a few of the key tunes and passed these over to Darren to check. He confirmed that the tunes were for the Paddle Mania conversion.
We were informed that Paddle Mania was written by Mark Greenshields under contract for Pantheon Software, but Mark confirms he didn’t work on the game. The graphics were believed to have been done by Sam Mohibull. However, the Pantheon Software lead could mean that it was the guys behind Superkid who may have done the conversion. We need to do some more digging!
As for the game, it was a sort of Table Tennis game meets Speedball. According to Darren, the game was axed for reasons unknown and entire resource was moved onto Continental Circus instead (possibly because Paddle Mania bombed in the arcades).
After checking out a disk with some graphics on, Jason Kelk discovered some SNK labelled images – which Darren later confirmed as being graphics from Paddle Mania. Likely done by Ned Langman. We’ve added the screens in the gallery, but also a download of the source files for you to take a look at yourselves.
It is hoped that we may find out who exactly was coding the game very soon, and maybe even find something playable. It is believed that the game was not actually completed. Just how far did it get then?
Contributions: Rob Whitaker, C64.com, Darren Melbourne, Mark Greenshields, Jason Kelk, Ross Sillifant
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Sources_Paddlemania (zip)
Gallery
Creator speaks
Ned recalls about work on Paddle Mania:
“Haha, Paddle Mania, wow that takes me back. They had me holed up in some flat in Croydon doing that when I was about 18. I have a vague memory that it might have been Imagitech? Not sure. I remember going up to Sheffield with Darren to see their offices around about that time. Sorry I can’t be more helpful!”
Update history
03/06/16 – Details about double pack added thanks to Ross Sillifant
According to The Games Machine, paddlemania was to be released as part of a double pack, with Nikki The Radical Ninja, rather than a stand alone release.
No reasons given, but thought I’d mention it.