Cover to Cover: SSI Summer 1986 Catalog (pp. 2-3)

We're paging through the Summer 1986 Strategic Simulations Inc. catalog, with another page of new/converted wargame, RPG and simulation titles on page 2:

Battle of Antietam is another Civil War military wargame, with an improved battle system that was further refined in Battle of Gettysburg (on page 1, see yesterday's post), and was making its debut on the IBM PC, a gaming platform that was just starting to get off the ground, handicapped as it was by the limited CGA graphics standard.  Computer Baseball shows us what detailed baseball strategy games looked like before interactive, animated ballgame visuals became standard; it must have been popular, as it seems to have been converted to most of the extant platforms.  Field of Fire is another wargame, which from the screenshot shown, appears to have originated on the Atari computers and was now coming to the Apple II.  And Wizard's Crown was another party-based RPG inspired by Dungeons & Dragons; an official license would become SSI's bread and butter a few years later.

Page 3 takes a brief break from the computer games to announce some games in development, and push posters and Computer Gaming World magazine:

Today, developers keep their upcoming titles quiet until they're getting closer to market, but SSI was eager to talk about some upcoming products, some of which apparently never saw release.  Of the new games, we can guess that the hinted-at "in the works" games included Gemstone Healer (1986), sequel to Gemstone Warrior.  I can't see that the promised Shiloh wargame was ever released, though SSI had already released a game in 1981 called Battle of Shiloh so perhaps it morphed into another product or was simply abandoned.  1986's Warship was probably the "tactical simulation of World War II surface naval combat in the Pacific" referred to here; the "monster of a game" seems not to have come out, and perhaps one game about the Pacific conflict was enough for this round.

The conversions likely saw release, as it was good business to port established hits to other platforms.  And I wonder how many people bought the posters -- they are likely rare today, if not particularly valuable.

It was not uncommon to see cross-promotion like the CGW ad at the time -- the industry was still growing, and it behooved every publisher to do its best to bring more people into the market, and SSI was just promoting the publication without taking a cut as a middleman here.  (I trust Computer Gaming World's reviewers had also been generally kind to SSI's products!)

To be continued next weekend, if all goes as planned, with more games...

Confirmed But Unreleased

Confirmation from multiple sources is a time-honored concept in journalism -- getting the same information via two different channels is generally a good way to validate news before it gets published.

But I ran across something interesting in the April 1990 issue of Video Games & Computer Entertainment magazine -- it features back-page ads from two different used game operations, Play It Again and The Fun Company (aka Funco, whose Funcoland stores would eventually be absorbed into GameStop.)  Both companies' game listings reference a number of NES games as "coming soon" titles, many of which remained unreleased -- and their listings and errors are suspiciously similar.  This is from the Play It Again ad:

Among the unreleased games are Aegina's Prophecy from Vic Tokai, which was released (or at least advertised) for the Commodore 64 but never the NES, and an 8-bit home version of Capcom's arcade classic Black Tiger.  There's a listing for something called Hector Vector -- the only possible connection I can find is that the characters in Nintendo's R.O.B. game known in the US as Stack Up are named Hector and Vector.  And both ads also list Empire City, probably a Western version of Empire City 1931.

More telling is that both ads list a mysterious game called Caracresta, which is likely a clerical corruption of Terra Cresta, also listed correctly in both ads as an upcoming title.  So this most likely means that both companies were working from the same questionable list of upcoming games, trying to stay ahead of magazine lead times to keep their ads as current as possible.

But there are a few games mentioned in the Play It Again ad that aren't mentioned by Funco -- Battlefield Napoleon, apparently a US release of Irem's Napoleon Senki.  And Hulk Hogan, which is probably an incorrect name for Wrestlemania.  Play It Again also lists both Touchdown and Touchdown Fever, almost certainly a simple duplication error.

And then there's Street Fighter -- long before the sequel Street Fighter II became a major hit, or even arrived in arcades, somebody apparently thought Capcom was going to port the original 1987 arcade game Fighting Street to the NES.

This makes me wonder:  If players had been exposed more broadly to Street Fighter on the NES circa 1990, how would the vastly superior sequel have been received?  Would it have whetted our appetites, or turned us away without ever dropping a token?

Alternate universes, man.  Like wow.

Ten Finished Nintendo 64 Games -- Make that Seven

The final issue of Ultimate Gamer magazine provided its readers with some last-minute "earth-shattering info" that unfortunately threw journalistic caution to the wind, proving to be wildly speculative and quantifiably (at least 30%) inaccurate:

This was around the time that the console originally known as the Ultra 64 was being rechristened the Nintendo 64, and gamers were anxious to know what the launch library was going to look like.  This article, unfortunately, proves a rather poor guide in retrospect.
Most of the photo coverage on this page is devoted to a Final Fantasy VII tech demo that was produced when Square was exploring the Ultra 64 hardware -- but it was never close to finished, and in fact, as most of you will know, the game ultimately arrived on the Sony Playstation, looking nothing like these early concepts.

Then there's something called Ultra Zelda Legends, purportedly "five times larger than the Super NES game," which might have been a meaningful measure if the game were in 2-D.  Or actually finished.  Or called Ultra Zelda Legends, which sounds like a title straight from the elementary school playground rumor mill.

At least this one probably wasn't horribly disappointing to anyone -- a Nintendo 64 version of Top Gun, which, according to Wikipedia, was a cancelled edition of a Spectrum Holobyte game released for the IBM PC and Playstation.

The other seven games on the list of 10 arrived in one form or another, so I guess the list isn't all that bad.

Although I also note here that Mario 64 apparently didn't make the list of the ten "finished or nearly finished" games.

Dang, I was looking forward to that one.

Unreleased: Drac's Night Out

The podcast I was hoping to have ready this week isn't going to make it on time, so instead I'm going to share some information about an unreleased game that turned up while I was doing some research.

Parker Brothers circa 1990 was planning a vampire-themed game for the Nintendo NES as a joint promotion with Reebok.  The game, to be called Drac's Night Out, was designed to promote Reebok's "The Pump" athletic shoes -- the protagonist, a teen-aged vampire (just like in real life), was supposed to "pump up" the sneakers to gain faster speed and higher jumps (just like in real life).  So the whole play mechanic was a marketing device -- not a bad idea, really, though these kinds of ad-driven games rarely turn out well.  The game was scheduled for release in the winter of 1990-1991, according to an article in the November 1990 issue of Video Games & Computer Entertainment magazine.  But it never showed up at retail.

Fortunately, however, a prototype version of the game with a playable first stage has survived into the emulator age, and numerous clips and reviews are available on YouTube.  From these artifacts, we can see that Drac possesses hypnotic powers he can use to freeze villagers, but he can't actually attack them directly.  He has to flip switches to encourage Frankenstein's monster, a ghost, a rolling boulder, a poisonous arachnid, a portcullis, a falling chandelier, an axe-throwing suit of armor, and/or a swinging pendulum... among, one presumes, other elements of classic horror... to knock the innocent civilians out of commission.  Once that's done, he can kneel down and drain them of blood with a pleasantly graphic sucking sound.  Evidence also indicates that the Reebok "The Pump" shoes are simply picked up as an instant power-up, so perhaps the "pump up" mechanic described in the press release didn't pan out in practice.

The available clips indicate that the gameplay got repetitive after a while, but the concept isn't bad, and it has a mid-1980s arcade feel with nicely-animated cartoon sprites.  It's a little different from the typical late-era NES platformer, and it's a shame it never got released.  Here's a playthrough of the first level captured by YouTube archivist mrgamer1 -- enjoy!

Unreleased: Intuition and Scraper Caper for the Atari 2600

Tigervision was one of the many Atari 2600 videogame publishers that jumped into the booming early 1980's marketplace, then left just as quickly when the business soured, failing to deliver products promised when the sky seemed to be the limit.  Parent company Tiger Electronics survived, but Tigervision's final Atari-era catalog included finished box art for two cartridges that never even saw the light of day:

Scraper Caper was in the works as a sequel to the hit 8-bit computer game Miner 2049er, partially converted to the 2600 by Tigervision, but the game was cancelled in favor of a more conventional sequel after creator Bill Hogue decided the concept wasn't panning out.  Scraper Caper was much-anticipated and heavily promoted -- full-color two-page magazine ads were run -- but it never actually came out on any platform, let alone the Atari 2600.  Apparently, the game was contractually replaced by Tigervision's Miner 2049er II, a second partial rendition of the original game presenting three more levels, a rare late release that's not mentioned at all in this catalog.

More interesting is the mysterious Intuition -- the catalog copy promises some sort of New Agey creativity exercises involving colors and shapes, and I can't even begin to imagine what the programmers actually had in mind.  Who Aqam is remains a mystery, as well -- the term Googles as various acronyms, but I doubt the program was created by Al-Qaeda Associated Movements, in association with the Air Quality Assessment Model, or based on Adaptive Quadrature Amplitude Modulation.

Unreleased games are always more tantalizing than the reality of the released ones -- these were Atari 2600 titles, after all -- but it's always fun to pore over the historical ephemera for something that might have been awful, might have been great, but never even was.

The First Violent and Adult Video Games

Back in the dawning home VCR era, Wizard Video was a pioneer in bringing exploitation movies to VHS and Betamax.  The company was ready to leverage some of the movies it had licensed into another new medium for Christmas 1982, running this full page ad in Electronic Games magazine:

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre actually made it to market, but wasn't really as violent as the ad would have one believe -- the Atari 2600 didn't have the horsepower to render realistic blood spatter.  As promised, the game did cast the player as the vengeful Leatherface, but the innocent victim looking for safety mode failed to arrive at retail.

The titillating X-rated space adventure promised by Flesh Gordon sadly failed to show up at all; its place in Wizard's brief two-game venture into the industry was occupied by Halloween instead.  Based on the ad copy's description, it sounds like Flesh Gordon was planned as a maze/adventure game, loosely based on the movie.  But as it never saw the light of day, kids longing to visit the planet Porno would have to wait until they were older, and would find it to be a sad, pathetic place.

Unreleased: Shaun Cassidy's Teeny Bopper

Back in the late 1970's, Shaun Cassidy was the hottest male pop star, television actor and locker pinup around.  So it's no surprise that K-Tel's Xonox label licensed his name and sort-of-likeness for an Atari 2600 videogame, slated for release in the summer of 1983.

Shaun Cassidy's Teeny Bopper was finished but never released, mostly due to bad timing -- Cassidy's last pop hit was released in 1980, his Hardy Boys television series wrapped up that same year, and Data Age's Journey Escape was already on the market and not doing particularly well.  The game was planned as a girl-friendly counterpart to Chuck Norris Superkicks for one of Xonox's odd "double-ender" cartridges, but was replaced at the last minute with Artillery Duel.  The game was believed lost for many years, until a prototype ROM recently surfaced at an Ohio record collectors' auction. 

If anything, the game was too realistic, seemingly inspired by Cassidy's real life as opposed to his celebrity image.  The actor/singer married in 1979, which may explain why the gameplay was similar to whack-a-mole, with a mallet-wielding Cassidy fending off the advances of his adoring teen-aged fans as they rose, zombie-like, from holes in the ground:

Points were earned for every broken heart, with the game speeding up as play progressed.  Higher difficulty levels forced Cassidy to dodge critical brickbats dropped from above; a rumored Parker Stevenson sprite is nowhere to be seen in the final build.  The game also features background music, a rarity on the 2600; unfortunately, it's an annoying one-note rendition of the chorus from Cassidy's first pop hit, a cover of Da Doo Ron Ron, played ad nauseam on a short loop.

It's possible that a Shaun Cassidy game could have been a hit if it had come to market when the 2600 was also young and entrancing.  But the hardware could muster only a faint, muddy likeness of Cassidy's bucktoothed grin, feathered hairdo, and caterpillar eyebrows, and by the time the idea came to fruition, pop culture had moved on.

It's a pity, really; almost like a sad April Fool's joke.

Don't you think?

19... oops, 15 Ways to Start the 90s with a Bang!

Atari's Tengen division started out as a Nintendo licensee, then broke away from the official program to release games on its own, citing restraint of trade by Nintendo.  There was some serious corporate subterfuge involved, as Atari's lawyers obtained the NES lockout code under false pretenses, but Tengen managed to put out quite a few NES versions of Atari and Sega coin-op properties while the various suits and countersuits churned through the legal system.

Unfortunately, not all of the games in this two-page ad spread from 1990 actually made it to market:

Missing in action:  Xybots, Police Academy: The Video Game, License to Kill, and Hard Drivin' (which, believe it or not, actually exists in prototype form.)

What I've never understood is why Tengen was able to pay Sega to license conversion rights for Shinobi, Alien Syndrome, and Fantasy Zone, while resorting to deception to avoid paying Nintendo.  Nintendo's licensing program was famously restrictive -- but it also provided distribution and promotion support, and prevented flooding of the market with mediocre product (at least for a time).  Without those restrictions, third parties would have had a tough time making the scads of money most of them made in the NES era.

It's true that being out from under Nintendo's thumb avoided the five-titles-per-year restriction and allowed Tengen to produce quite a few games, most of which were better than the other unlicensed NES cartridges on the market.  But it really looks like a bad business decision in retrospect.

Although maybe not as bad as spending ad money to promote four games you're never going to release.

Unreleased: Star Tribes: Myth of the DragonLord

Spinnaker Software was a pioneering publisher in the computer edutainment field, with titles like Facemaker and Below the Root to its credit back in the early 1980's.  As the industry matured, the company turned its attention more fully to entertainment.

Spinnaker's ambitious game called Star Tribes: Myth of the DragonLord was advertised in full-color magazine ads circa June 1990, but never saw release:

According to the ad copy, It's coming.  It's Coming very soon from... Spinnaker. 

But there are no screenshots on show, and  no real details aside from the breathless promise of dazzling clay animation characters, incredible graphics and futuristic role-playing ... of epic proportions.

So this artifact is incredibly meta -- it's actually promulgating the myth, of the Myth, of the DragonLord.

I don't buy it.

But I would have.

Unreleased: Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill - "New" Screenshots!

It's Election Day here in the US, so I'm going to push our Adventure of the Week back to Thursday, because I've actually found something videogame related to post about today.

Political satire is a rarity in the world of videogames, but back in 1993 Kaneko's US division planned to release Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill, a side-scrolling action game based on the official Clinton family pet.  The game was finished ready for release on the Super NES and Sega Genesis, and magazine ads and reviews were running.  But the game never made it to store shelves after Kaneko Japan decided to close its Western division, and in an even more unusual twist, no physical prototype or ROM image of the game has yet surfaced as I write this in November 2009.

So Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill remains one of those mysterious unreleased titles - we know enough about it to guess that it was no masterpiece, but as it got well beyond the concept stage it has become a tantalizing "lost game" from the 16-bit era.  It reportedly featured political figures like Ross Perot, Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush as bosses, which would have been entertaining to see in action.

Anyway, a number of ads, screenshots and box art scans have surfaced over the years, but I didn't find these specific images anywhere else on the Web.  These images are scanned from a review published in the July 1994 issue of GamePro magazine.

This screen reveals a bit of educational gameplay that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere.

 

And this one makes it clear that Socks was not going to be much competition for Bubsy, Spike McFang, Aero the Acrobat, or any of the other furry platforming hopefuls that invaded the market in Sonic the Hedgehog's wake.

But the game did exist, and hopefully it will be discovered someday.

Ultravision: The Ultimate in Vaporware!

The Ultravision Video Arcade System was announced at the 1983 Consumer Electronics Show.  It was meant to be the ultimate in home consoles-slash-computers.  It was even advertised for a few months by its manufacturer, Miami-based Ultravision, Inc., before it disappeared without a trace.

The company's ad in the November 1982 issue of Electronic Games magazine featured this teaser mention -- next to their "consumer satisfaction guarantee" promo for its Atari 2600 games Condor Attack and Karate, there's a tiny drawing of the Ultravision Video Arcade System - "coming soon!"

Note that the Atari 2600 games Ultravision is promoting are supported by a "consumer satisfaction guarantee" -- which as documented here consists of allowing the dissatisfied customer to exchange the unworthy product for another Ultravision game.  Good news if the other one is better... or actually comes out.  More on that later.

The January 1983 EG ad oddly omits any mention of the Ultravision VAS, and also leaves out the disappointing details of the consumer satisfaction guarantee.  At least it changes up the ad copy to actually describe the games on offer:

It's reassuring in a way to know that the Ferocious and Invicible (and fictional) Amazon Condor is the Planet's Greatest Enemy, and not on the brink of extinction or anything. And there are even a few more "innovative and entertaining alternatives," i.e. games, in the works -- Quest for the Idol and Spider Kong.  But whither the Ultravision Video Arcade System?  Fear not, for its coming is soon heralded by a 2-page ad spread in the February, 1983 issue of Electronic Games:

It sounds pretty good, actually.  It has all the advanced features any 1980's gamer could want -- a headphone jack, built-in TV screen with tuner, AC/DC power options for portability, and full compatibility with the Atari 2600 and Colecovision via an external module.  The home computer side of the system has 64K of RAM, a "state-of-the-art Microprocessor" and can be activated by the optional Master Keyboard.  It's also slated to host its own line of super-advanced coin-op quality game cartridges with "dynamic visual effects" including three dimensional graphics and zooming.

But there are some suspicious omissions here.  Why does the only pictured game, Condor Attack, look just like the Atari 2600 version?

(Actually, the drawing used in the ad looks a little better than the real thing, but you see my point.)  Why are the advanced computer capabilities illustrated by an artist's rendering of a bar chart?  Why does the "photo" of the unit look suspiciously like an airbrushed promotional image with a cut-and-paste TV picture inserted, rather than an operating unit running software?

Well...

Time went on, and the Ultravision ads disappeared.  No price point was announced, no more convincing images of the console appeared in the magazines, no Ultravision-specific games were promoted, and the system certainly never shipped.  I'm not sure an operating model was ever shown in public, and the Video Arcade System may not even exist as a prototype.  It may have been a casualty of the crash, but even if the industry hadn't tanked, it looks more like a case of big dreams with insufficient financing.  As the industry downturn kicked in a year or so later, I'm sure there were a few investors thanking the gods that they didn't pour any cash into Ultravision, Inc.


The company did complete the first wave of games it had promised and advertised, but they were mediocre even by Atari 2600 standards -- Condor Attack actually came out in stores, and proved to be a shoddy Demon Attack clone.  And despite the months of advertising, Ultravision's second game, Karate, was never released in commercial quantities, though it was later picked up for distribution by Froggo Games during the 2600's brief NES-era revival.  Spider Kong apparently became 20th Century Fox's Spacemaster X-7, among other titles, and Quest for the Idol was never seen in any form as far as I can determine.  The advanced Ultravision versions, meanwhile, appear never to have made it to the screenshot stage, let alone an EEPROM manifestation.

Public Enemy said it best:  Don't believe the hype.