Yet another Thalamus title goes into the archives after a feature in Zzap Italia on the company. Here it was mentioned that Restrictor was coming to the C64 – with the following (translated thanks to Luca Bertoldi):
“Arc decided to work on an original game, Restrictor, in which you can have fun by driving and flying. Since the game is in an early development status, we do not know if we will first see the 8-bit version or the 16-bit one, but you can see in the picture that the game will let you control a super car and a flying vehicle along a 3d landscape. There will be 4 planets to explore and many alien waves to fight. Right now the scrolling looks very smooth, who knows what we can expect in the final version.”
So at the time, only the 16-bit version had been seen – it isn’t known if the C64 version was ever even started. The 16-bit versions also never saw release in the end.
Well, Arc Development’s Richard Underhill set the record straight in early 2021:
“There was never any C64 version in development and as far as I remember it was never considered. After the disaster trying to get something substantial in terms of sprite scaling on C64 Overlander at the cost of good gameplay, I’d have considered it a non-starter.”
So there we have it. You can in the meantime read more about the 16-bit editions here, but for the C64 edition it is case closed!
Contributions: Luca Bertoldi, Brendan Phoenix
Zzap 64! Issue 63, pg 56, has a small preview. Only mentions an Amiga version however
Cheers Brendan, added! :)
July 1990 issue of The One magazine had Richard Underhill saying ideally he’d liked to have written an Atari Lynx version of this game, so there’s another format that this game could have appeared on, had things been very different.
Not C64 related, but if you ever do an Atari GTW (fingers crossed)…..