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An interesting conversion which never seems to have got much spotlight, but was indeed a C64 conversion in the workings.
Confirmation made by the screenshots printed in Commodore User magazine back in the time.
This was kind of a cross between Top Gun and G-Loc back in the day, and was a conversion of an old Sega Coin-op which
wasn't too well known compared to the likes of Afterburner.
From the screenshots we can see a game which seems to have been taking shape, although looking a little plain. Just how it would have played is unknown.
Looking at the time of the screenshots, it seems to suggest that the game was in development around the same time that R-Type V1 and Time Scanner V1 was being worked on. Could this have been part of the same development team behind one of these games?...
Apart from the preview mention in Commodore User, the game was never seen again. Sadly recently we learn why...
Commodore User (August 1988) had the following news article which explained why this never quite surfaced...
In a shock development, Mediagenic/Activision have announced that they won't now be releasing their licenced conversion of psychedelic coin-op shoot 'em up, Lock On. This is the second major coin-op licence which has failed to appear from Activision - there is still no sign of their long overdue 64 version of Super Hang-On. In both cases the programming house involved in the conversion work was Southampton-based Electric Dreams.
The decision to drop Lock-On came after a review of the work-in-progress to date. According to an Activision spokesperson. "Basically the 64 version wasn't fast enough, and it just wouldn't have been an economic proposition to continue workign on it. It just didn't look like it was going to be up to standard without a lot more time and money being invested in it". The company felt that they had no option other than to scrap the game.
"Though we're obviously very disappointed to have to shelve a game, it just wasn't coming together on play test. And frankly, its a lot better than releasing sub-standard product. After all, play testers are ultimately there to stop consumers from being ripped off".
Well, never stopped Activision before on the C64 :) ... But still, its a huge shame. So the game was overall dropped merely because of speed issues. From the looks of things, it used a vector based approach, maybe sprites could have been better used?
So now we know what happened, but who was behind it, and does anything still exist? The C64 developer of Super Hangon is currently being asked, so we hope to learn more soon!
We have no credits, so this will be a very tough search, but do you know more?
Frank.
(Additional
source credits - Peter Weighill) |
