The War Of The Dragon was to be an Hungarian developed game back in 1989, which was based on a book written by Miklós Tihor and Zsolt Mazán.
The book was published in 1989 by LSI and the guys wanted to create an adventure game out of it using the text and illustrations from the book, with more material added in. It was not decided who would publish the game, it could possibly have been self published or published by LSI.
It made perfect sense to have made a game on the C64 at the time, and the platform was very popular at the time in Hungary. With the market however getting too small and then having to arrange for additional text and translations to get sorted for outside of Hungary – it was starting to cost a little too much in the mind to get the game past a prototyping stage.
The developers moved onto other commercial games and applications on the Amiga and PC and the prototype was then laid to rest. We hope to hear Miklós’ story on the game soon, but check out the Creator Speaks section from István, who we think was to be one of the coders.
István sadly confirmed that he no longer has any development disks, so maybe Miklós could still have something of the abandoned prototype for posterity. We shall see!
Contributions: István Fábián
Supporting content
Creator speaks
István Fábián talks about The War Of The Dragon:
“Although not quite a GTW, but here is a new one anyway:
http://www.antikvarium.hu/ant/book.php?konyv-cim=a-sarkany-haboruja-&ID=2096
“A Sárkány Háborúja” is Hungarian for “The War of the Dragon”.
This was a fighting fantasy book written by Miklós and Zsolt with illustrations by Miklós’ mother, and lectured by me, published by LSI.
We wanted to create an adventure game out of it, using the text and illustrations from the book with lots of new material added.
The release would have made commercial sense for the C64 at the time since the book text was in Hungarian, and C64 would have been the only platform to make any sales on in Hungary at the time.
However, the market would have been too small, getting the additional text and illustrations done time and money consuming and all of us had started to work on commercial games and applications already (working on Amiga and PC), so it never got past prototyping…
I am afraid I don’t have my C64 work disks from that time, so nothing much remained.”
