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Released on the Amiga back in 1989, Wayne Gretzky Hockey was a great little game of hockey. In an 1989 issue of games magazine "Games Player's" and in its Amiga review, it mentioned that a C64/128 version was being planned for release that year. It is hard to imagine EA doing a game so late into the 80's when you consider they practically left the C64 market early on to go onto the 16-bits.
However, we can confirm that a conversion was started...
Michael Hart was given a dream job at the age of 14 as a beta tester at Bethesda Softworks before they hit the big time. At one point during his career in around 1990, Michael joked about doing a C64 port of the original Wayne Gretzky Hockey game, seeing as the NES version was being done and released. Chris Weaver had heard the idea and told Michael to go ahead and do it if he wanted. Michael was loaned the NES source code as reference and Michael set to work on the game in his own time. It took some weeks to knock out a prototype due to school work and other things, but he got smooth scrolling just right with tons of players moving around the screen. The guys at Bethesda saw it and loved it and tried to encourage Michael to finish it off. But unfortunately just before he left the office that day, Chris Weaver decided to abandon the project due to the dying C64 market. That was the death of the game.
Michael did keep a disk with the work on, but sadly tragedy struck in years that followed and a leaky pipe destroyed all of his C64 disks and whatever might have remained of the game. There is a really really really slim hope that it ever survived in any other shape or form as a result.
It seems that the conversion was a test to see Michael's programming abilities, with Chris knowing from the start that they probably couldn't release it as it was too late into the C64's life for them.
A huge shame overall, but we will keep this one open in the hope that it may turn up some day... you never know... For now, read Michael's full story in Creator Speaks, and we'll get on with the search...
Do you know more about this conversion?...
Frank.
(Additional source credits - Michael Hart) |
