1992-2008 Bitmap Brothers
Platforms: PC Engine and Nintendo DS
The PC Engine/TurboGrax-16 is a wonderful platform with a wide range of titles, including my favourite – Parasol Stars. As the platform started to get a little bit of traction, we began to see a large number or promised titles – Gods would be one of many which were promised, but would never see the light of day.
Gods was a stunning looking platform/puzzler that would see conversions to a number of platforms over the years. It was PC Engine Fan magazine in June 1992 which posted a preview of the game and mentioned it as coming soon for that particular platform.
There wasn’t much in the way of detail, apart from just roughly that the game was an “seemingly orthodox action game” and raved about the graphics and music. There was also no mention of developer or when the game was due for release. Though there was a large screenshot of the game in action – but was this really from the PC engine, or just merely a screengrab from the Amiga edition?
Paranoia Dragon made a good point that Gary J Foreman had worked on Paradroid 90 for the platform, but then later went on to do the Gods conversion on the SEGA Megadrive. Maybe Gary therefore had some kind of involvement?
Sadly, Gary confirmed he had nothing to do with any conversion or knew anything about anyone else working on a PC Engine conversion. So therefore the search goes on to try and find out who was behind it and if it got very far. If you know anything more about the conversion, please do get in touch.
When adding this post, developed David Mowbray got in touch to say that he had ported the game to the Nintendo DS in 2007, but unfortunately it would never see the light of day. It was ported for Asylum, but never went to contract overall (he was also due to Speedball 2 as well).
David was up north at the time, and was going down to London to show the build off, and the game was running and rendering – but no sound or second screen functionality at the time. There were plans to move all the stats to the lower screen, and were thinking about how that should look – but it was canned before it could get any further. David had only just started Speedball 2 when he was told to shelve everything and send the codebases to Bitmap Brothers.
Sadly, David doesn’t have a build of the game as a result – so it would be dependant on Bitmap Brothers allowing something to be shown in the future.
With thanks to Paranoia Dragon for flagging up the title, David Mowbray for the Nintendo DS information, Gary J Foreman for information and Archive.org for the scans.
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