A short entry to cover a title which was being worked on by Jason Kelk (graphics) back around 1989 time.
The game was to be a sort of Trailblazer like game (with a mixture of Space Harrier and Fire Eagle to mix), with a character that ran along the coloured squares of the game. Jason Kelk recalls that the game may have contained a 2 sprite tall character which was not too different from Zamzara’s main sprite.
Code was by Jason Kelk, graphics by Alan Jesse with music by Jason Morrell.
The game was being done as part of a work experience project in a mobile classroom back in 1989 in Canterbury – with a week allocated to do the work. During that time, Jason Kelk and the others made a trip to visit the Zzap offices – which happened to be the day that the team at the time was fired.
Sadly, the guys were young and there were hardware failures which meant the simple game was never going to get finished. Things were never properly started, and it is unlikely that anything has survived of the game. However, the music did in fact survive and you can download it now!
We hope to hear more soon about this game!
Contributions: Jason Kelk
Supporting content
Available downloads
Creator speaks
Jason Kelk speaks about work on his Work Study game:
“The inspirations for this game were Trailblazer, Space Harrier and the demo Trail Mix by Soedesoft and Fire Eagle (because I don’t think we’d actually seen Cosmic Causeway at that point). My worryingly hazy memory also reckons that the player character was going to be a two sprite high alien because we’d played Zamzara a little but that bit could be wrong.
The programming was to take place as part of a work study placement (I’d left school’s 6th form by that point but came along anyway because I’m a nuisance like that) over four days from Tuesday 27th to Friday 30th of April 1989, with the Monday spent travelling to Ludlow to meet the Zzap! 64 team. My memory could never recall this level of detail, but on page 7 of issue 47 of Zzap! there’s a message (relayed via Rockford) asking Alan to phone and arrange the visit. Alan also arranged for the three of us to use a mobile classroom at a site belonging to either Canterbury college or the university; we had three C64s, two 1541s because mine was being repaired and some portable tellies.
The idea was to go for a relatively simple game to give us a chance of getting at least something done in the four days, but things didn’t go well with hardware failures and so on (and three teenagers left to their own devices aren’t necessarily going to be the most motivated workforce ever) so the chances are that what little was actually dones has been lost apart from Jason’s music.”
