Our next entry is a title that was apparently intended for Firebird, though it may have been wishful thinking. Was it ever submitted to Firebird, who in 1989/90 were changing into MicroProse software?
The game itself seems to have never been finished, perhaps because a publisher was never found. It is a fairly simple sideways scrolling car racing game (in space, as the title suggests) but is a little too fast to be fully playable and needs some adjustments. It comes with some nice digi sounds and does have plenty of promise at this early stage.
Creator Kim Lundorff Madsen got in touch via the comments in March 2024, and confirmed that they had created the game whilst at high school in 1989. They had done demos, but wanted to try and make a proper game that was inspired by several other older games at the time.
At the time though it was being developed, Kim had got an Amiga and the job to finish the game became laborious and no longer a work of love. He just wanted to finish it, so he did it all quickly.
Several brandings were made for various distributors, and not just Firebird and the game was sent out to everyone. Kim didn’t know how to reach Firebird, but found an old address and sent a disk. He never heard anything back – but then Firebird had likely moved and were picked up by that point by MicroProse.
He also never heard anything back from the others, but its likely it was via the address it went to that it got leaked. The game would sadly never properly see the light of day, but its thanks to the leak that you can see and play it.
Contributions: Jazzcat, Kim Lundorff Madsen
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Preview_RaceThroughSpace (zip)
Gallery
Update history
04/03/24 – Developer talks about the game and what happened.
I developed this game, whilst in highschool in 1989. I had been doing doing some demo’es on the C64, but though that maybe I should try making a proper game. The game was inspired by several much older games.
By the time I started developing the game for the Commodore 64, I had already gotten an Amiga 500. It was a larger job than I had anticipated. And in the end it was no longer a work of love – but just something, that I wanted to finish. So I did not spent enough time polishing it up.
I made several brandings of the game for various distributors – not just Firebird. I did not really know how to contact them – remember it was before WWW. So I found the address of FireBird in an old computer magazine and sent of a 5 1/4″ floppy disk to them… And I never heard back. It might not even be the right address, that I used.
Hi Kim, thanks very much for getting in touch and giving some feedback about your title. I’ve updated the main page as a result, and its great to learn the story behind the game.