An interesting entry, this time a game which never saw the light of day which was being produced by FTL.
FTL was an arcade division of Gargoyle Games, and they got working on their first 3 titles: Shockway Rider, Lightforce and Samurai Dawn.
Now as you can guess, and because you’re reading this very page – Samurai Dawn never quite made it along with the first two. Shockway and Lightforce did on all platforms. But Samurai Dawn never surfaced even on the Spectrum (Following that link will show some advert scans, including some of the cover art)
There doesn’t seem to have been any mention specifically of a C64 version, but we can only assume that there was of somekind due to the C64 releases of their other two titles. But Luther Bhogal-Jones brought up an interesting point that after reading our entry on Thundercats V1, he always thought that the Gargoyle Games’ Thundercats was simply their unreleased FTL game Samurai Dawn, re-skinned for Elite.
What with the sword fighting nature of Thundercats, this could potentially be a good indication of what happened to the game. Elite may have paid Gargoyle to get them a Thundercats game very quickly, and they decided to just reskin the S.D game, thinking they could make a lot more money out of a licensed conversion. We’re not sure yet, but hope to find someone from Gargoyle to confirm. Otherwise we may be looking at a rather different game overall.
Well, we were close – but in 2015, we discovered that Samurai Dawn was likely not to have turned into Thundercats, but Gargoyle’s other game – Wolf, was in fact Thundercats originally. It is still possible that Samurai Dawn turned into Wolf, but it seems unlikely.
Do you know anything about this game?
Contributions: Luther Bhogal, TZX Vault (for scan)
