The collection of earlier versions of Activision/Electric Dreams games seems to be growing, and we have another here with Super Hang-On, which was flagged up on the Lemon64 forums by The Wolf.
Out in the wild are two versions of Super Hang On, both are pretty poor – due to how the developer Darrell Etherington had to pick up someone else’s abandoned work and finish it quickly. However, one of the versions features much larger bikes in the game.
Looking in more detail, the larger bike edition seems slightly unfinished. At the very start, there is no starting metal frame, but crucially there is only one single CPU bike that you see at any one time. The roads in the Africa edition are also red in the large bike version, but yellow in the smaller bike edition.
So what has happened? Well, in Games Machine magazine – they suggest that the C64 edition had been pulled from shelves due to quality issues. One theory is that this was the larger bike edition, and then Darrell made improvements, such as reducing sprites to get more CPU bikes and tweaked the colours etc. We hope to learn more from Darrell soon to get confirmation.
We’re not entirely sure how the large bike version got out – if it was released as the disk version, or was an earlier release like with Chiller and its different music. One poster (Nayphee) on the Lemon64 forums suggests that in Australia, there was a budget re-release of the game where the large sprite version was on one side of the disk, and the smaller sprite version on the other.
What is really strange is that the C64 version was never really reviewed at all by anyone at full price. Only at budget I believe at a later date. If anyone can find a proper C64 full price review, please let us know – it will be interesting to see which version they reviewed.
For now – our hunch is that the game was reworked into the smaller sprite version as some minor set of improvements. But we’ll wait and hopefully hear from the horse’s mouth about what really happened very soon.
Contributions: The Wolf, JazzGhostrider
