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A
strange game which was popular on the Amiga, mainly for its wacky
animation.
This
game featured a blue blob of putty which could mould itself into
numerous shapes and absorb strange creatures to help defeat a
geezer called Dazzledaze. Decent
animation, weird cartoony graphics etc planned to form superb
platform puzzler on the 64.
Apparently
the game became too complex for the 64 and was binned so that
concentration was focused on Fuzzball. All that remains was to be a tech demo featuring the blob and most of its animations.
Robin
Levy
was confirmed to have been working on the C64 version of the game,
doing all the graphics. As for the coder, it was none other
than John Kemp behind the programming.
The
animation was very sophisticated and ate away at memory, using
up many sprites to simply stretch. The idea of having Sprite overlays
was virtually impossible, and various problems occured in the
development. All of this added up to morale being lost on the
project, and eventuated in John Kemp leaving the games industry
for good.
Jason
Kelk confirmed seeing the preview while up at System 3, and apparently
was at very early stages, probably what Commodore Format saw when
they took their preview picture. The sprite animated very well
in the demo.
Originally around 2006, things were looking very bleak. The
likelyhood of the game surviving was very slim. John Kemp
had checked and could not find Putty on any
of his work disks. The only place it may have existed was on
the 286 PDS which System 3 had. It was likely that this was now
long gone, and thus Putty C64 was looking to be immortalized only as the one single solitary scanned screen
from Commodore Format.
But in early 2008 things took a rather surprising turn! John Kemp managed to find a few disks labelled with "Putty" and confirmed that he had found the last version of the game. All disks were passed to Dan Phillips to preserve, but then Dan got a job in Canada and then passed the disks to Robin Levy. With everyone being very busy the past few years, it is only recently in December 2010 that Robin posted GTW a bundle of disks which included the remains of Putty.
And so we are very pleased to announce the salvaging and preservation of yet another long lost title which you can now download and check out! (Thanks to Slator for the bug fixed version!)
Now don't expect something fully playable, as you will not find that. But what you will find is a promising tech demo with some unseen graphics done by the great Robin Levy where you can control Putty and navigate around various little platforms. Controls are a bit fiddly, especially jumping - which is achieved by holding down for a long period of time then releasing in a direction to make Putty jump far. The stretch animations are superb, and it looked like things were really coming together!
Additionally - a bonus was to discover additional screens as you climb vertically, giving a glimpse of screens never seen before. Overall the preview makes you wonder that had they not done the hi-res overlays, how a Putty conversion could well have been very possible. This early preview proves that something was possible :)
Finally that's not quite all - but there were also a bundle of PC based disks with Putty labelled which we could not read. We believe this is the source code to the preview. We don't believe there will be anything else that isn't in the preview, but we will try and confirm anyway and see if we can preserve the sources. Before we also forget, here are scans of the disk labels of the work disks.
So now all that is left is to possibly hear more from John Kemp himself about the game and his development thoughts, but we are now very close to closing a case which has been open for over 10 years now for GTW. Enjoy!
Case pretty much now closed and with a good ending! :-)
Frank.
(Additional
source credits - Jason Kelk, Jed Adams, Robin Levy, Dan Phillips,
John Kemp, Slator)
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