Indeflataball
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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1988 Silverbird
Status: Full Game, Findability: 5/5

Coding: Cory Kin
Graphics: Cory Kin, Toby Eglesfield
Sound: N/A

Yet another Firebird title to go into the GTW archives, this time a title by Cory Kin. Indeflatable was written for Firebird Software back in 1988 – a few years before their other unreleased title Gem Quest.

The idea behind the game was to control a space ball that could change size by interacting with different enemy aliens – so that you could fit into different sized tunnels or pipes (in a similar concept as in Mario Bros). It was essentially a sci-fi based horizontal scrolling shoot-em-up mixed with some maze game concepts. A level is completed once you find the exit.
The game featured some excellent graphics by Toby Eglesfield, music was planned to come later from Matt Gray if the game was picked up.

Once the game was presented in a final state to Firebird, they were paid and asked to change the titles so it could be released on their Silverbird label, but nothing happened to it.   The developers thought it was down to the game, but it was actually down to the Silverbird label being dropped, so it didn’t quite manage to squeeze out.

Since then the game had been sitting on Cory’s disks for many years – sadly at the time Cory could not find the game – but after sending his disks to us, we found it! Or at least remains of it at first!

Originally we thought that was it – but then Cory found a last batch of disks which GTW converted in 2017, and found the game in its complete and final state for Silverbird.

Sadly, there was no music included – as things went dead shortly after payment and nothing could be arranged.   Cory believes they would have got Matt Gray to do all of the music.

A huge shame overall that this never got a proper release – but we are glad to share it with you thanks to Cory. Here is the full game as an early Christmas present for 2017 thanks to Cory.

Contributions: Cory Kin

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Cory Kin talks about Indeflatable:

“Indeflataball master disks are at my parents house and I will try to get them sooner or around Oct time when they visit us. Hopefully those disks would still work ;-). The game was written probably around 1988, a couple of years earlier than Gem Quest.

The idea behind Indeflataball was that you control this space ball that could change its size by interacting with particular enemy aliens to fit into different sized tunnels or pipes (e.g. the same concept as in Mario). It was basically a Sci-Fi based horizontal scrolling shoot-em-up mixed with some maze game concepts type of game with 3×3 tile maps. A level is only completed when you find the exit.

Toby did some amazing graphics for it before he went on to join Code Masters as a full time professional graphic artist. I remember making several mini-games or demos to help show case his graphics to impress Code Masters ; one of them was our infamous Train demo that Matt Gray kept mentioning in his demos LOL!

It was Toby’s idea to change from “Indeflatable” to “IndeflataBall” so that the notion of “Ball” would be enforced in the title – a play with words ;-)

Looking back, when we presented the finished version of the game to Colin and co, they were not that impressed. Mind you, we had slaved away too many long hours and days into it and wasn’t happy with the end results either. We had high expectations ourselves. I guess, we were too young and did what ever came to mind for what it was worth and it was our first game. We really should have concentrated on important factors such as game playability rather than nice graphics and smooth scrolling.

Anyway, the past is the past and we can’t change things ;-) It was never published but we were paid for the work.”


http://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/indeflataball/
