If anyone can be called a connoisseur of videogames, it’s Frank Gasking. One of his favourites is Deadlock for the Commodore 64. “When you look at the game and its level of detail, it’s one of the best-looking titles ever seen on the computer thanks to the artwork of Robin Levy,” Gasking told us. “It was made a few years before Super Metroid came out on the SNES and it’s almost like the team from that game had seen Deadlock running. Of course, they hadn’t.”
There’s a strong reason why he’s so convinced that the team behind one of Nintendo’s most iconic games couldn’t have drawn inspiration from Deadlock. The latter game was never actually released. Like so many titles over the years, it was put in limbo, with the axe eventually falling in 1990. “The major stumbling block was that the game design was far too ambitious and got messy, so it lost its way,” Gasking said. Yet it still remains a firm favourite to this day.
One of Gasking’s hobbies is unearthing gaming treasures, and he’ll go to great lengths to track down information about games that never saw the light of day. In some cases, that’s as far as it gets: disks, cassettes and hard drives are lost, wiped or corrupted, seeing hours, days, months or even years of hard work vanish without a trace.
There are times, however, when development assets or even complete games are mined from dusty attics and basements. And when they are, the impact can be huge. “When remains of the first iteration for the Commodore 64 were recovered recently, it completely blew up around the internet due to its link to the popular film,” Gasking said. “It was only an early preview without a huge amount to show but, because of the link to Arnie, it caused a bit of a stir.”
