Back in the 1980’s, Atarisoft were doing official conversions for the Commodore 64. Vanguard was one of them! We learn of this conversion thanks to Mat Allen who has documented the conversion briefly in Digital Press. We hope to learn more about the conversion soon as a result.
We are not sure at present how far the game got, or why it was cancelled, but we guessed it was due to Atarisoft breaking up at some point. However, Phobos/Ready64 found a snippet in Video Game Update (August 1984 – see scans) which suggests that Jack Tramiel got Atarisoft to stop all C64 developments and focus just on Atari. It wasn’t the video game crash that caused the cancellation of titles. Thanks to Roberto Nicoletti and Phobos for the heads up.
Thanks to Duc Nguyen, it has been found on the GDRI webpage that Designer Software was behind the conversion, and its possible that Bill Bogenreif was the coder. Early days, but its a lead!
Contributions: Mat Allen, Phobos/Ready64, Roberto Nicoletti, Duc Nguyen
The GDRI Atarisoft page said Designer Software was behind the conversion of Vanguard. I suspect Bill Bogenreif was the game’s coder.
https://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php/Atarisoft
Thanks again Duc!