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Quark was due to be released by PSS (Personal Software Services) but for some reason it doesn’t seem to have ever been released.
Usually in these incidences you can look at the release list for a company and see that perhaps they were quite small and disappeared as quickly as they appeared, or that the game fell outside the boundaries of their usual released, but PSS released nearly two dozen games between 1983 and 1988 and although their main area of expertise seems to have been war strategy games, they released several arcade games, such as the famous Macadam Bumper, Hyper Biker and the brilliantly titled Bath Time. Quark is described as a ‘3D-Space Simulation’, you control an ‘astro fighter’ and the aim of the game is to take off from your planet and seek out enemy ships and engage them in combat before they destroy the main reactor on your planet. Although the advert states that it would be ‘in shops 2nd June’ there are no in-game screenshots, only a picture of what would presumably be the cover of the game.
As such we cannot tell how far along the game was in its development before it was presumably pulled. For a release date to be announced we have to assume it was at a playable stage at least, but the absence of in-game pictures means we cannot confirm this. The image in the cockpit we can see, of a ship being targeted suggest the game may have had 3D graphics along the lines of Battle Zone, Echelon and the Star Wars games. So what happened that meant Quark would never see the light of day? We have no way of knowing, as PSS had a good track record of releasing games across Europe it seems strange that Quark never made it onto the market.
Do you know anything about this game?
Alex Ross.
(Additional source credits - Peter Weighill) |
