Although Pang actually did make it out on the C64, it wasn’t just Arc Developments who had a crack at producing the C64 conversion. Programmer of the C64 version of Speedball 2 and Turtles, Carl Muller tried to get the licence to produce Pang for Ocean by creating a quick demo to demonstrate that he could do it.
After about two weeks worth of work, this reasonable attempt was created and sent to Ocean, but the licence was turned down, and eventually Arc Developments got it.
So the preview was all that ever remained of Carl’s own attempt for the licence. A good attempt in its very early stages, but shaping up reasonably well. Graphically terrible, though Carl knocked up the graphics just to test and demonstrate the basic game principles itself at this phase.
A previously unseen prototype of Pang, all found.. case closed!
Contributions: Carl Muller
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Source_Pang (zip)
- Preview_Pangv1_2.zip (zip)
Gallery
Creator speaks
Carl Muller speaks to GTW about work on Pang V1…
“This was after I hooked up with Nick Pelling (Frak, 3d pool), and I was learning the PDS cross-compiler and proper C64 coding. I don’t know the exact circumstances of who had what rights to the game.
I’d been meaning to get this to assemble (away from PDS) for a while now… Am I getting old or is that game harder than I remember? :-)
Notes on Pang (pang.t64):
Keys for player one: IJKM (movement along ground/ladder/platform) ‘ (creates a ball) space (fires harpoon)
Keys for player two: AZ,. (movement along ground/ladder/platform) Backspace (creates a ball) / (fires harpoon) <- key to play again” is ‘ on frodo
god knows why I put a notepad style editor in there…”
Carl Muller .
Update history
13/07/21 – Added source files, which seemed to have been missed off for a while.
Recently I stumbled upon this prototype or whatever you may call it. I don’t know when this preview of a game to be was added to GTW64. But it seems this exact game was already around for some years (maybe widely unnoticed). Onslaught made a release in 2003: https://csdb.dk/release/?id=12363
Yeah, we basically first released Pang V1 in December 2003 (I think as part of our Christmas update) within the archive. The developer Carl Muller kindly passed on a number of his unreleased works back then after preserving his work disks. A lot of the news posts were lost during the migration to the new backend, but here is the archive file I added which refers to when we added it: https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/gtw64-news-archive.txt
Wow! I hadn’t noticed this. Going to have a play later :-)