Yet another Thunderbirds game was in production you may be surprised to learn, and we have learned about the game thanks to Jayenne Montana, who tells us that the game was in the advance planning stages before it was cancelled due to a contractual ‘en passe’.
The game was to be a 2.5d left/right scroller, described by Jayenne as a capture flag and shoot-em-up. It was shaping up very well in design, and had sandbox code/art produced. Could we ever find any of it?
Jayenne had the following to say:
“I have very little sentimentality regarding my own work and did not collect any games/artwork of products I had worked on and so have nothing to offer in respect to demo’s, screenshots or other L – wish I did now – still, we live and learn I guess.”
It’s possible there might be something – but its likely to only be a rolling demo which Jayenne mentioned was all that was ever created.
Clement Chambers (Head of CRL) had the following to say:
“Got the rights from Gerry Anderson and started work. Firebird offered a much bigger deal. Got a phone call from Jerry to the effect that he was going to do the Firebird deal in any event so all deals were off.”
As a side note, the same person who took the Thunderbirds licence, also tried to nab the Rocky Horror Show licence too from CRL. Cheeky begger!
Could the rolling demo be found?… maybe, but its unlikely…
Graeme Mason mentioned that the Terrahawks game that CRL previously did may have been the reason that Gerry Anderson decided to not let CRL do a licenced game. The Terrahawks game bore no real relation to the series, and this may have put Gerry off the deal.
Lost forever?…
Contributions: Jayenne Montana, Clement Chambers, Alex Ross, Graeme Mason
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I never heard anything about a C64 version of this game in production. I joined the company when Jay was working on the Spectrum version, and he never mentioned it. I don’t know where Jared got his information from. Maybe it was hush-hush for some reason, as with Bubbles? The game would have suited the C64, which was better suited to sideways scrolling than the Speccy.
There may be another reason – although even if true, probably secondary to the money factor as outlined by clem above.
Terrahawks WAS published by CRL and although it was an excellent game (featuring advance vector graphics) it bore little relation to the show. It was suggested to me that maybe Anderson saw this and thought maybe a change of publisher was in order, deserved or not.