An interesting title brought to my attention from a reader of Atariage.com, Avram Dumitrescu.
This is a kind of frogger clone which was developed for Adventure International by a guy called Russ Wetmore. A review of the released Atari game gives this rough description…
"In Preppie you control prepster, where your job is to recover wayward golf balls that have been hit into the rough. Along the way, you must avoid speeding golf carts, bulldozers, lawn mowers and gigantic frogs in your quest. You must also leap canoes, logs and gators in order to negotiate the water hazard.
Completion of a screen results in a more difficult setting, which must be negotiated at a faster pace. Don’t even graze an ankle — you’ll end up flat as a pancake underneath an adversary. A clock at the top of the screen ticks off the precious seconds. Unless you retrieve the balls on a screen before the clock winds down, you will automatically lose a life.
Preppie is addictive, humorous and maddening all at the same time — an unbeatable arcade combination."
It seems like a very good conversion then. So what happened to the C64 version?
Russ had the following to say: "Preppie! was rewritten for the C64 by some developers that hung me out to dry and never delivered the final product. To be fair, the C64 graphics architecture made a straight port nearly impossible."
So sadly it might be slightly tough trying to locate anything of this game, but hopefully Russ might soon be able to point us in the right direction. Time will tell!…
More soon we hope…
Contributions: Avram Dumitrescu
