Games That Weren't 64

Nothing yet.

Around the time of Chris Shrigley's early success with Bounder,
Gremlin Graphics were regularly employing the skills of what was later to be come Core Design.  Chris was assigned to a game called Task 2, which was apparently named due to the objectives in the game.  This game was brought to light by Terry Lloyd, graphics man for many C64 games.

The game was a horizontal scrolling shoot-em-up, with the main ship (temporarily) borrowed from Nemesis. The game involved
flying from one end of the map to the other, and go in reverse again in similar vein to Defender. The task was to get to the end within a time limit, whist avoiding obstacles (in similar vein to Scramble) and shooting enemies. Once you got to the end, you had to race all the way back (covering the map twice, hence Task 2). Although pulled, the guys felt that the game had a lot of promise.

Sadly the game was in development at the same time as Bulldog. Why is that a problem you ask?... Well, Gremlin looked at the situation and found that they were about to release two SEU's around the same time of each other. Looking at the completion status of both games, Bulldog was the most complete, and so Task 2 was indefinitely shelved.

Completion was believed to have been around 50%, with most of the graphics all pixelled by Terry Lloyd. Music no doubt would have later been composed by Ben Daglish, and we are quite confident that he never started anything sonically for the game.

We have been in touch with both Terry and Chris, and it seems like we may never get to see the game. Chris is now based in America, and over the years has moved around a lot. Disks have sadly become lost, and it is very likely that the C64 materials from his early days are long gone. Gremlin work was often done on Wise terminals according to Chris.

A quick search however by Chris did sadly not dig up any results. However, one small possibility remains with Terry, who may have a few disks with graphics left on, and possibly a small demo of the game running. We live in hope, and hopefully we will be able to save and preserve Chris and Terry's long lost game..

Chances of finding this game could be long gone sadly...

Frank
(Additional source credits - Chris Shrigley, Terry Lloyd)