Enduro Racer V2  (Preview)
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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Enduro Racer V2
1987 Electric Dreams

Status: Preview, Findability: 3/5
Coding: Nick Pelling
Graphics: Unknown
Sound: Unknown

After what was an abysmal conversion, Electric Dreams were seemingly keen to make up for some reason.

Instead of just forgetting about the conversion, a later PCW show (Zzap issue 32) had reports from Electric Dreams about
 working on a new revamped version of the game.

Now we are not sure if this would have been from the same perspective, or from a new Zaxxion perspective which was adopted by the Master System version. It is likely that they would have had a better programming team, or the same team with new techniques to improve the conversion.

But the big question is why Electric Dreams considered doing another version?….

In 2011 we had a very interesting email from Kevin Tilley who (based in Australia) had a copy of the Big Box 30 compilation by Beau Jolly. Previously I had found there to be a rather different version of Wonderboy in the compilation (with an enlarged main sprite), but Kevin’s version had a very different version of Enduro Racer in place.

A crack of this version seems to have existed for quite some time, but has been tucked away without much fuss and named “Super Enduro Racer”. The game seems unfinished with a number of glitches, but it is fairly close to completion and upon closer inspection, we noticed the words “By Orlando” written at the start.

Now Orlando is better known as Nick Pelling, and we need to find out more – but Nick has had a connection with Enduro Racer from the very start – even being credited to the game conversion that did make it (when actually it was Doug Anderson who was behind the conversion!). Was Nick behind a reworked version of the game, or was this entry actually a V1 rather than a V2?

The game feels much much better than the final version, featuring rolling hills, better graphics and better looking sprites. Speed is a bit slow though, but you can see the promise. There are about 5 stages in total too – though you can drive all over the place, and the collisions aren’t quite sorted.

Very exciting developments, we need to find out more from the developers to see what happened. There is also an interview/news snippet somewhere in one of the magazines which we feel gives things away. But how did the unfinished game come to end up on a random copy of Big Box 30, when no-one else had that version?

Close to being solved!


http://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/enduro-racer-v2/
