A tragic tale for this title, where Plotting was in fact fully completed and even reviewed by the top C64 magazines at the time.
The game was planned for Cartridge release, to allow for instantaneous action and plenty of graphical backdrops and busy title screens. The game was developed for Ocean by Twilight Software, with music by Sonic Graffiti. However, it was never to be and the game would never appear on shelves.
Plotting was leaked onto the cracking scene, where it is rumoured that the game was stolen from Ocean by someone at the company. A conflicting report suggests that the game was already scrapped and had accidently leaked out via other means. I can’t quite see why Ocean would decide not to release what was a pretty solid game. We hope that Stuart Cook will be able to shed some light in the future on what happened.
The download shows a lot of loading, which indicates that the game was certainly built for cartridge. Some people on the C64 scene have confirmed this with the memory layouts matching Ocean cartridges. The loading occurs between title screen and demo. The game however was cracked from disk and not cartridge. It is not known if a cartridge was actually produced or not, Paul Hughes apparently left Ocean before the game could have been built.
Graphically the game looks good, and plays very well.. sadly the 2 player mode is missing from the original. Additionally the game seems to just loop with no ending, so we’re not 100% sure if this is a final version of the game, or if there is potentially more to find.
For now though, check out the game for yourself and see what you think.
Contributions: Jazzcat
