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A pretty big turn up for the books when Ramos gave GTW the heads up about this game. Mark Gallagher is already known to GTW thanks to his other game Shylock which was uncovered, but on a set of pages he also did a bit of digging around some old C64 disks and uncovered one of his only commercial ventures for the C64 - Deathstalker.
Deathstalker was originally throught to be a Spectrum/Amstrad only game, which was a bit of a surprise to myself - as pretty much all of Codemaster's games were cross converted... however it seems now we are getting a trend, what with this, Mission Jupiter, Twin Turbo V8 all coming forward. The original Spectrum game was developed by Tony Warriner and released in 1989, it was an average affair - recieving fairly poor ratings. The game itself is a sort of Karnov/Switchblade looking game, but with slightly unclear graphics (very monochrome) and gameplay which you've seen a hundred times before. It did however feature a neat David Whittaker tune!
After doing a bit of C64 work, Mark applied for the job of converting the game to the C64. He got the job when very young and went to visit the Spectrum's developer Tony Warriner. He was given all of the game code and graphics to take apart and create a C64 conversion. Unfortunately due to a bit of coding inexperience, Mark ran out of memory and found that he had to ditch doing the conversion for Codemasters. More details can be found in Creator Speaks!
Mark had actually got quite far, but because of the error - development stopped. It wasn't until recently after by chance coming across some disks that worked ... Mark recovered the game and ported it over to PC for people to download. And so here it is!
The demo is very early and does not feature proper sprites, just blocks - but you can walk around the landscapes, and there is a bit of minimal interaction. Music is borrowed from Matt Gray. The graphics as you can see are a straight port from the Spectrum, and are very unclear in the grey tone. Also beware that picking up some objects will crash the game!
Also now added is a quick tidied up version from Ian Coog which means you can pick up objects without the game crashing!
We are hoping that there may be a bit more of the game to recover, maybe one with the sprites in place and maybe even a long lost David Whittaker tune!.... Possibly the version that ran out of memory is a lot more complete, but its early days yet! Maybe we may see more of this yet?...
Watch this space, but grab yet another long lost Codies game!....
Frank.
(Additional source credits - Ramos, Mark Gallagher, Ian Coog) |
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