Yet another obscure game, this time by an obscure company called “Mushroom”… Who I don’t think lasted particularly long.
As you can guess, Super Scramble is a clone of Scramble and according to the review in Home Computer Weekly, it was pretty good!
According to the review, the design was excellent, with smooth scrolling and nicely animated radar scanners and rocket exhaust. The music was apparently an appalling version of Paint it Black and the only way to turn if on and off was to shoot/bomb musical notes scattered around.
Well, it never surfaced… but the musical description rang a bell (The toggling via the musical notes) and sure enough Rabbit Software’s version of Skramble did this. But the music in this version is from Star Wars.
So was the Mushroom release actually a pirate of the Rabbit Software game?… Well it seems it was trying, as the advert from Mushroom Software states that Nigel Rowlan was the coder, and it was indeed him who did Rabbit’s version. So now we know that we’re looking for a variant of the game! Can you help us find it?
Thanks to Peter Weighill and Rio Baan in January 2020, an auction has appeared selling just the inlay and no cassette sadly. But a scan has been added to the archive. So it exists – just need to find a copy to digitally preserve.
Contributions: Peter Weighill, Rio Baan, Marco Das
Hi Marco, that’s great news! Thanks for that and will be great to see a hi-res version preserved! A shame the tape wasn’t with it overall.
The competition though was a “spot the difference” thing with the two images, so I don’t think the cover you have was done as part of a competition directly, and was an official cover that was used to sell the game.
The dates are very odd though – My guess is that the Mushroom game was Nigel’s original Rabbit game enhanced with some extra features to make a quick buck. Will be very interesting to find a copy to compare.
Hi Frank,
I bought the cover of Super Scramble, will send you hQ scan lateron.
If you read the competition you can see you have to send in before august 31th.
On the cover it says September 1984. So i think this cover is made for that competition.
The rabbit version is released januari 1984. But only marketed by Rabbit, thus distrobution.
It could be the games were never sold to Rabbit.