A bit of a shock when looking through some Darren Melbourne disks which C64.com preserved. This was simply labelled on a disk “Unnamed”, and it is certainly a game which was meant for CRL (due to the CRL logo appearing in the corner). It feels very much like a Power House game and has you flying a 2 sprite high man around a single level it seems, where the game crashes if you go into a door.
As the game was on the same disk as Duel, we wondered if the game was actually written by Finlay Munro, as Finlay also wrote Vengeance and Real Stunt Experts for CRL in the past. Vengeance has a very similar graphical style to it.
Finlay confirmed in 2012 that the game was indeed his, but he could not recall what it was actually called and why it was never released. What he can recall has been added to Creator Speaks.
Clem Chambers could also not recall anything about the game, but stated that he would have wanted a good platform game then as they never did much in that genre. So we still have no name or idea what happened with the title. It has been suggested though by Graeme Mason that the game could well have been intended for Power House, which Clem would not have seen. Seems like this could well have been the case, and we hope to hear from someone from Power House soon to confirm more about the game.
Still plenty of research to be done, but check it out for now! Thanks to Slator for the fixed file!
Contributions: C64.com, Darren Melbourne, Slator, Finlay Munro, Clem Chambers
Supporting content
Available downloads
Gallery
Creator speaks
Finlay Munro recalls about this unknown CRL game:
“Yeh, that unknown one is one of mine. Dont think it was ever finished, but then again I remember very little about it. Didn’t he have some spinning power-up things orbiting him?
Quite surprised Darrens disks are still working and readable after all this time – nice one! Can’t for the life of me remember its name. It was a really early one for me.
If it’s the one I’m thinking of ( and I must stress I may have got this wrong ), it had the enemies spawning from generators. You can see one of these in one of the screenshots you pointed me at. They were character based, and you could have loads of them. Each one was maybe 3X3 or 2X3 chars. Dunno. They moved about simply like gauntlet enemies, and would only move left and right, or drop down. So you’d get them all piling up on top of each other. Also some sprite based enemies were in there too.
Don’t know the year I’m afraid. It must’ve been just before CRL stopped trading.”
Hm. Just a thought on this. The Power House label was bought by Ashley Hildebrandt from CRL sometime in 1988, he used to run it for Clem. I don’t think it last too long, but maybe this game as submitted to them. I’ll do some digging.
Good thought! Didn’t think of that, seems very likely actually!