Chuck Rock
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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Chuck Rock is your typical average cave man. He likes to spend his Sunday afternoons watching football and drinking beer. Unfortunately, his peaceful existence is interrupted one day when his wife, Ophelia Rock, is kidnapped by the village wierdo, Gary Gritter. So, Chuck is rather upset about this whole situation and you have to help him make things right.

The game is a side-scrolling platformer. Chuck fights of a variety of dinosaurs using his belly-buster attack and a jump kick. Occasionally he has to pick up and throw rocks to defeat enemies and allow him to jump to greater heights.

Alternate Titles
"チャックロック" -- Japanese spelling

Trivia

The part of the intro sequence where Ophelia bows down was changed in the SEGA CD version: she simply keeps standing. In all console versions a sexual reference in the outro text was removed.

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(From GTW64): 

Was it or wasn’t it?   The question which has been asked for sometime about whether Chuck Rock on the C64 was ever officially released.  To be honest, we had assumed it was – but was just a pain in the backside to find.

But with no-one thought to actually owning an original of the game, a bit of digging found that Core was not happy with the quality of the C64 conversion and decided to cancel it rather than release it.  This was even though all the adverts had been published and magazines had reviewed the game.  Oddly, it scored 96% in Zzap, which was actually well deserved.

Built by Genias for Core, the conversion was pretty solid and faithful to the original – although the game itself wasn’t the best in the world, and slightly overrated – the conversion was as good as it could have been – with some very good graphics, replication of the original rock band title screen and good music/sfx throughout.

I’ll leave describing the game itself to the review which can be found in the gallery, but essentially the game was a platforming game where you could hitch rides on various creatures and throw rocks.

Thanks to the guys at Ready64, it was found that during development of the game – Core decided to cancel the project due to believing that the C64 market was dwindling.  Genias wrote to Core and got written agreement to have the game completed and released only within Italy.   In an interview with Genias manager/coordinator, Raffaele Valensise (in Italian at present), it is suggested that working with Core was a rocky time – with no real sense of belief that the game was going to be anywhere near as great as the Amiga title.

Although Core never got the title released in the UK and around Europe,  they did congratulate the Genias team for doing such a superb job.  Sadly many of us were never given the chance to purchase the game, and for years as a result – the game was subject to question of whether it was ever properly released.

In early 2013, Sam64H from Lemon64 came forward with some photos taken of a copy owned by a friend. I’ve added the photos to the entry, and then later a series of higher quality scans. The tape copy was apparently brought via Ebay UK, and the disk version in Ebay Italia over a decade ago now.  It is probably the first time many of us have seen an original copy of hte game.

We hope to see that the original disks and tape gets preserved, as this is now very important. There may well be more copies out there, but it has never surfaced – so this might be the only chance of properly preserving the game in its original format.  Watch this space!

Contributions: Sam64H, Mr Fox, Ready64, Ricchesuccio


http://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/chuck-rock/
