Yet another unreleased Codemasters game! … But this time from early on in their life in 1987. Phantomas was to be a conversion of the released spectrum game where you control a robber in a Manic Miner/Dizzy kind of game.
The game saw a sequel released, which oddly Codemasters released under a different name of “Vampire”, and which saw release on the C64. Perhaps it was renamed because the C64 edition hadn’t been released, or just to tie in as a horror themed game. What is odd is that the Phantomas 2 release in Spain has the same Vampire sprite, but the ZX Spectrum release of Phantomas 2 has the original character.
This original first game conversion however was being completed by Mark Greenshields, who previously developed the excellent Split Personalities, and worked on the mixed received 19 Boot Camp.
According to Darren Melbourne, the conversion was very faithful, and was actually completed! So why did Codemasters choose not to release this faithful conversion? Bizarrely, Darren says the finger points to the fact that it was too much of an exact Spectrum clone, without any upgrades to take advantage of the C64 hardware. For this reason it was canned.
Yes… one word springs to mind… Dizzy… but alas… this was seen differently.
Mark suggested that he wasn’t paid for the work, so never got the final game. It’s believed that the original game didn’t sell very well and for that reason Codemasters decided to ditch the game.
Can this ever be found for GTW? Mark offers hope that he may still have it, but its unlikely.
Contributions: Darren Melbourne, Mark Greenshields, Fever
Supporting content
Gallery
Creator speaks
Mark Greenshields talks about work on Phantomas:
“Phantomas never happened on the C64 as Codemasters did not pay me for the code so never got the final game. I think the original did not sell too well so they didn’t publish the C64”
Update history
19/10/23 – Tidy up of page and info about the sequel.
Worth adding a mention that a game that Codemasters DID release – Vampire is aka Phantomas II – secretly the the sequel to this one?
Seems like Vampire was released in Spain by Dinamic Software as Phantomas II anyway…
https://gb64.com/game.php?id=16240&d=18
Great spot Fever! Vampire was indeed the silent sequel to the original game (i’ll update the page quickly). What is very odd though is that the ZX Spectrum version of Phantomas 2 has the same character as the first game, but it has been changed in Vampire. But the C64 release of Phantomas 2 still has the Vampire sprite.
Would be interesting to know why they decided not to release as Phantomas 2 – perhaps because of the very different theme (or the lack of a C64 release for the first game), and that maybe they could sell more copies with it as a sort of horror themed game.
Spanish C64 users knew about “Phantomas 1” from Dinamic… So when they released “Phatomas 2” for ZX, MSX and Amstrad, they seized the opportunity :)
I’d love to see this game. Fingers crossed it appears soon :-)