Super Pac Twins was hyped up in the pages of the later issues of Commodore Format, even featuring as a Diary Of A Game.
The classic Pacman concept was to be taken and updated with more sophisticated mazes and a two player mode.
The game was shaping up well, and Paul was getting there, when something quite bad happened. Commodore Format was going downhill, and was being ran by Simon Forrester, who put the demo on the powerpack without Paul’s permission (Paul had even written on the CD, “Not For Powerpack!” on it!
Paul was quite upset about this, and halted work on the game. Simon Forrester even slightly insulted the game, and invited readers of the magazine to send in their game ideas to improve on the game. Of course, this was just before CF’s demise, so I don’t know if anyone entered it.
Anyway, the game was shelved and the preview is pretty much all of what existed. However, recently, Richard Bayliss gained rights to take over the project and completed it, releasing it to the world for free, which we have now added to the download for posterity.
As to what Paul would have done and had as the final game is all but a dream now. A sad end to a promising little title, but some compenstation with the fact that Richard Bayliss finished off the game.
Interestingly though, the game concept was picked up by Paul again after about 6 months and turned into Twin Balls, which also didn’t get a release. Here you can also read Paul’s story about how SP was turned into the game and what happened.
Classic concept, almost making a fresh start… case closed…
Paul Kubiszyn speaks about work on Super Pac Twins…
“With regards to the text, yes it is all correct. Although my name is spelt, KUBISZYN :) but not to worry.
I was exteremly angry when CF published the demo without my concent. I can not stress how many times in silver pen I wrote over the CD “DO NOT USE ON CF COVERTAPE!!!!!!”. It was the one and only reason for scrapping the project, after this there was no way this could ever have been a commercial success.”
Paul Kubiszyn.
Then later in 2012…
“SPT was being developed by myself with creative input from my brother Mark, and was the intension that the final full game would appear on the CF covertape. Although it was discussed that at some later stage in time we would provide CF with a demo, the one which they ran with was not the demo and no permission was given for them to use it, in fact we didn’t know anything about its inclusion until we saw it on the covertape like everyone else. The very early developer preview which they were provided with was only for the benefit of allowing them to grab screen shots for inclusion alongside the magazine diary article. I guess by the last issues they were having trouble filling the covertape, or wanted to avoid paying out any money for the covertape.
I think it was either six months or a year afterwards that I thought of resurrecting the project. My thoughts were to sell the game myself. Although the advertising from the CF articles may have helped, I considered the demo inclusion on the covertape enough to put people off and therefore a name change was decided upon. I think at the time I may also have been worried about a title already existing with the name Super Pac Twins, but don’t quote me on that as we didn’t have the large internet archive we have these days back then. Twin Balls was used as the game was intended to be for 1-2 players at the same time. At the time I was heavily influenced by the likes of Penguin Towers, Bomberman, and of course wanted to add in the Pacman element also of collecting pills. I still think that a game today would be great to feature all those elements in one go. My only real memories of developing Twin Balls were the music (which is available I think in the HSVC collection) and the wondering how I was going to program the handling of multiple bombs with multiple players and how each would interact with each other :) That’s why in the demo you can only lay a single bomb, I simply hadn’t got that far yet.
As for why it was shelved, I think it was around this time I started full time employment and gradually the C64 became less a part of my life. Today my work (and child) still consume all of my spare time, allowing only the following of the scene on Facebook, Twitter and online etc. In a small way though, through Facebook I still feel part of a scene and love the C64 community. One day the time will come for a return! – I hope soon to introduce my little 3 year old girl to the fun of the C64 :)”
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