Unseen News

If everything worked correctly, you should notice all around this post a new graphic style for U64. In April 2008 we evolved our old html website into a better WordPress archive, but as we did not have much free time to think about a new graphic to go along the new site, we just kept the base WP theme. After a year, in April 2009 we decided that U64 needed a better theme too. And here it is! We are still working on some details (let us know if you find some bugs), but we are happy enough with this new graphic style.. what do you think about it? Probably we’ll have an even better one sooner or later, but right now this is the best we can do with our limited free time. Thanks to everyone for the support! 

Robert Seddon has linked us to an interesting interview that TrueChipTillDeath.com had with Neil Baldwin, chip music composer and director at Eurocom (a UK-based video game developer founded specifically to develop games for the NES), in which he revealed a previusly unknown (?) – and unreleased – NES game:

“I do remember the game very well. The game was practically finished. We just kind of lost communication with the Japanese publisher and it got shelved. It was based on a Terry Jones book. I have a ROM of it. I’ll have to see if I can twist some arms and get the game ROM released like Hero Quest. The unreleased game [is] actually pretty good. I seriously would love it to get out into the community; if only to put the music into context. It’s a role player, similar to the old Zeldas. It was one of those rare occasions when I actually paid attention to what was in the game. “

You can check the full interview at TCTD. It’s nice to know that he’s interested to share the game with the community and we can only hope that he  could be able to release it soon!

Update: on Neil Baldwin’s Website there are some more info on the game and some “unheard” music tracks to download! The book on which the game was based is “Erik The Viking”

We were producing the game for the now-defunct Japanese publisher, Video Systems and had pretty much completed the whole game. However, geographical and language problems made the testing and bug-finding phase frustratingly difficult. We were almost solely reliant on the publisher finding bugs/issues simply because there was only 4 of us trying to deliver this fairly large and complicated game and as we didn’t speak Japanese and they didn’t speak much English, it made for an interesting process.

Even I had to get involved in map building and putting together trigger/behaviour scripts for the game’s events as well as writing all the music. It was all good fun though and the last version of the game that we submitted to the publisher was in great shape and actually good fun to play!

However, things ground to a halt as the shared frustration of trying to communicate bugs and issues led to a breakdown of the relationship with the publisher and we parted ways with the game destined for the scrap-heap.