A wonderful and surprising finding to enter the GTW64 archives, thanks to the efforts of Genesis Project in late February 2021.
Splish Splash is a previously unknown game that was intended for release on the Mastertronic budget label back in 1985. The game itself was written by Adrian Sheppard, who around the same time had/was converting One Man and His Droid to the C64. Adrian would later go on to develop Vampire and Grand Prix Simulator for Codemasters, as well as Pipe Mania for Empire.
The game was randomly found on an obscure set of Italian C64 disks as a frozen file, and has now been tidied up and bug fixed for release. Just how it got out is a mystery, though we suspect that the game was submitted to Mastertronic and someone there leaked the game out. We have managed to track down Adrian and hope to learn more shortly about the game and what happened to it exactly.
You must guide Splish through the factory using the lift to take him to each floor and place buckets under the holes in the pipes. When a bucket is full, or partly full, you must throw the water through a window at the left of each floor. A very simple, but fun concept overall which would have made a reasonably decent budget release at the time (especially compared to the guff like Bionic Granny that was released!).
Thanks to Roberto Nicoletti from Ready64 and Mr. “D#” (Ready64 user), we learn that the game was apparently sold through an Italian Magazine called Crown Games. In the gallery, you will see a photo of the tape which was brought recently via an eBay auction. It seems that someone froze Splish Splash and put it onto the tape, but although the tape is preserved, the Splish Splash file does not work and efforts are underway to get it backed up.
Roberto spoke with John Holder, who was the official importer of Mastertronic titles in Italy. He revealed to Roberto that the Crown Games magazines + tape was the result of a legal agreement entered with a publisher to distribute Mastertronic products through newsstands. Sales did not go as expected and after a few issues the publication closed.
Thanks to Roberto and TSM, a 100% dump of the tape has been made along with a better picture of the cassette. This is how the game came to be released, and its great to see the original source of the title now saved.
Contributions: Hedning/GP, Roberto Nicoletti, Mr. "D#" (Ready64 user), TSM
Supporting content
Available downloads
- splish_splash_original_TAP (zip)
- Game_SplishSplash (zip)
Gallery
Update history
- 22/08/24 – TAP image preserved
- 17/06/24 – Details about the game’s origin added.
I remembered I had a board game called Splish Splash
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/10040/splish-splash
Maybe Mastertronic got in legal bother from Hasbro for using the same name or maybe they were just worried they might? The board game was originally released in 1981 so it would have had ‘prior art’
Very interesting! There is a possibility they could have had issues with the name, though they could have just renamed it as a result. I think they did this a lot with submitted games. I wonder if that had caused any issues though – so its a good shout.
There are a few gaps in the IC0xxx numbering for the Mastertronic range around the same time as Bionic Granny so it is possible that this could have been accepted by them to be published, assigned a number for release and then slipped through the net for some reason.
Obviously, at the time they were putting a high workload on John Smyth and Mark J Brady so whether they weren’t able to get the box art ready in time, didn’t have capacity at their duplicators (at that time they didn’t own their own equipment) – could have been a number of reasons but as well as these, there are quite a few gaps overall across all of their labels, some easier to explain than others!
Simon Plumbe
Mastertronic Collectors Archive
It is very bizarre – they had certainly released a lot worse too, so it could be related to lack of resources and then being forgotten about. Adrian sadly couldn’t recall what happened exactly.