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We
had it all, over a decade of quality C64 games for our beloved
machine. But it all had to end sometime. As the C64 started to
make way for its 16-bit counterparts, titles were rushed and often
shoddy ports towards the end. There was the odd gem though which
made the C64 proud towards the end of its commercial life, and
Rubicon was one of those titles.
Rubicon
was dressed to impress, with an array of phenominally good graphics
and some kick ass gameplay to boot. It got good reviews from the
magazines, but sadly never lived up to its high quality, due to
various troubles with Hewson and 21st Century
Entertainment going under. Although the game was released,
it never got the full spread as it should have done, and probably
was the cause of its low sales. A shame.
But
this did not deter the efforts and imaginations of the game's
creator, and so a sequel was put into development to continue
a success, although if it wasn't via its sales.
Rubicon
2 was
put into development in around 1992, initially for the Amiga,
but consideration also was given for a C64 version so late into
its life. The game was to be coded on the C64 by a new set of
programmers, while the first game's original coders would concentrate
on the Amiga version.
Joachim Ljunggren,
known as The Sarge to many on the C64 scene, was allocated to
the C64's graphics like he was with the first game. Joachim got
set to work on the game's graphics, whilst also drawing up a series
of plans and sketches to map out the whole game.
Sadly
however, once the sketches and plans were pretty much complete,
the game was cancelled and never progressed past their ideas and
initial C64 screens. It's not quite known exactly why it was cancelled
on all systems. Hopefully we will find out more soon.
But
in recent years, The Sarge has been in strong co-operation with
C64HQ,
a very popular C64 site with deals with all kinds of C64 news,
interviews and other items of interest. It is here where The Sarge
had a gallery set up for all his work, which included previously
unseen screens from Rubicon 2, and also a whole series of scanned
sketches.
Thanks
to Andreas Wallstrom,
GTW has been given permission to use and show these sketches within
our own preservation of the game. The scans can be viewed however
in much greater detail than here from C64hq. The scans show some
very impressive ideas.
The Sarge has been in touch recently, and has uncovered a very rare demo of Rubicon 2. And also a Zoom effect which was unused in Rubicon, and may not have been seen before, included as a bonus.
This is a very very early development demo which
demonstrates the game graphics moving left and right. It is possibly one of the only code demos ever made for the game, but there could well be more and i'm sure we will bring this to you in the future if it turns up. The graphics are amazing anyway.
A
potentially stunning title which was maybe a bit too late...
Frank.
(Additional
source credits - Andreas Wallström)
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