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Flashpoint was another production of the highly successful Denton Designs for Ocean Software.
This was to be a puzzler based game with the screen split into two segments and controlling some kind of pyramid structure. It wasn't a bad game, but it wasn't particularly great either it seems.
The game was advertised very briefly in Commodore Computing International, and briefly in other magazines with small mentions. Flashpoint was pretty much completed according to rumours at the time.
Stuart Fotheringham shed some light on the title, and indicated that after Ocean turned down Starrace, Flashpoint got pulled shortly afterwards. This may have been due to the game being a bit too crap for Ocean's liking. To prove the rumours to how complete the game was, the game eventually got released in some way on the Spectrum through a "Your Sinclair" covertape and can be found on the World of Spectrum website.
Sadly the C64 version never surfaced in a similiar way, which leads us to believe that it wasn't quite as complete as the Spectrum version. It did indeed get pretty far, though the screenshot isn't the C64 version it seems. Ralph (surname unknown) confirms that he did the loading screen and in-game graphics for the game, which had a more futuristic Tron-esque graphical look.
The shock news is that the game was actually complete, and was a good and playable game. The problem was that Flashpoint was considered too cerebral and hard to master by the publishers and never released. We don't unfortunately know who the developer was at present, but hope to find out asap!
A
puzzling curiosity of the scene...
Frank.
(Additional
source credits - Brendan Phoenix, Stuart Fotheringham, Aidan
Lockett, Ralph)
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