Another amazing looking C64 title that bit the dust, again suffering from the gradual commercial decline of the C64 back in the early 1990s.
After completing the C64 conversion of Rolling Ronny in 1991, the team were assigned to work on Rings Of Medusa 2, a stunning RPG game which was being done for Starbyte and Virgin.
90% of the graphics were fully completed for the game, and just needed the code to bolt it all together. Starbyte approached Markus Schneider to do the code, but refused due to personal reasons.
Starbyte did not bother to try and get any other coder to take the project, and so the game was cancelled with all of the graphics near completion. The game would just see release on the Commodore Amiga , Atari ST and PC (DOS) platforms.
Looking at the graphics dug out by Oliver Lindau, it looked fantastic and could well have matched the heights of the first game or even surpassed it. A huge shame that the title never had a chance.
Hopefully some day we will be able to see more of the game and what it looked like, but Oliver has many images of the game, including a very large map which has been pieced together and added here.
So there is nothing to find of this title, apart from maybe the odd bit of graphics for a potential slideshow in the future. But check out the screenshots courtesy of Oliver.
Contributions: Oliver Lindau, Marco
Supporting content
Gallery
Creator speaks
Oliver Lindau speaks about Rings Of Medusa 2:
“The sequel to the German top seller Rings of Medusa is a mixture between a strategy game like Kaiser and a role playing game. It was famous for its intense game play, complexity and presentation (only the 16-Bit versions).
It’s definitely the strangest end of a project I was involved. Right after finishing the Rolling Ronny graphics, the X-Ample artists Michael Satzer (Detert), Thomas Heinrich in addition with me were engaged to prepare the visuals for Return of Medusa. Markus Schneider was asked for code, but he refused the contract because of personal reasons.
Guess what: Starbyte didn’t search for another coder, even though 90% of the game graphics were ready to implement.”
FROM OLIVER’S SITE:
“This is the sequel of the top-seller “Rings of Medusa”, which was very successful in Germany.
The maps were created by Michael Satzer and Thomas Heinrich. The rest was done by myself.”
Update history
01/04/22 – Tidy up of the page.
