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Mentioned as a future title from Linel in Your Commodore issue 73, Necronom was a R-Type clone which saw eventual release on the Amiga/ST back in 1991 by Linel and later on Amiga Fun magazine around 1992/93.
The game got mixed reviews, with Amiga Format totally slating it - but Amiga Power's Stuart Campbell loving it and finding it a good stop gap after playing R-Type 2.
So what of the C64 game?... Well, as you can expect... Linel never mentioned a conversion again for the C64 and no screenshots or anything ever surfaced. In 1992, Linel/Genias released Catalypse, but that was it.
Contributor 'Nemo', found a review of the Amiga/ST game in a Greek magazine called 'Computer Games' in April 1992, which reviewed the game and also stated a C64 release on the formats list. Seems very likely therefore that something must have been started!
The Amiga credits list a familiar name - Michael Tschögl ... so did he do the music, and did Andrea Pompili by chance also code this before Catalypse? ... Well, not quite!
After porting a series of disks for Darren Melbourne, C64.com passed these onto us and we got to work checking the contents.
On one of the disks was a graphical slideshow from Chris Edwards, who worked for Pantheon Software (Superkid etc). A good few screens were from an aborted conversion of Necronom (as well as a loading screen!). So we can confirm that Pantheon Software were to be behind the game! ... a fantastic result!
So what happened to their conversion?..... Did it get far?..... We need to track down Chris Edwards as a starting point, which might be tricky.... but its a lead!
Check out the screenshots for now!....
Frank.
(Additional source credits - Nemo, Darren Melbourne, C64.com) |
