Imagine Software Invents the Mega Game
Back in 1984 an English based developer: Imagine Software, was struggling to remain profitable. They determined the main reason for their financial woes was substantially reduced profits from the previous year which they attributed to large scale software piracy. Not regular piracy that was endemic to home computers where friends would share disks and tapes with each other which were easily copied onto blank media, essentially resulting in getting a free game from your mate. That was small scale piracy and was just a fact of the industry due to the nature of how computers worked. Much like how any movies of TV shows could be recorded by anyone who owned a VCR. If you are under 30 years old then you probably have no idea what I’m talking about which really boggles my mind as it’s a sign of just how rapidly technology has developed in my lifetime. Anyway Imagine Software were very desperate as they were very close to bankruptcy so they decided to gamble their future on a very radical solution. Their solution was to create their next games to be hardware enhanced which meant that the games would have vastly improved graphics from what was possible on original hardware and secondly (most importantly) the games would not be able to be pirated very easily as the hardware would have to be copied as well which would make it a lot more complicated to pirate, thus resulting in much more profits for the company.
Imagine Software started advertising the Mega Game, which would cost a lot more then the regular retail price of standard games due to the addition of the hardware expansion which was mostly just an extra RAM pack. All in all they advertised 6 games as being in this new “Mega Game” format including: Psyclapse, Bandersnatch, Hero and Star Traders. None of the games ended up being released or even finished being developed as the company couldn’t stave off their debts long enough to avoid bankruptcy and liquidation. Many computer gamers were disappointed that the promises Imagine Software made of these vastly enhanced games never came to fruition and retro gamers have wondered what the games would have been like if reality went in a different direction and these games ended up being developed. It would have been a similar situation to when Nintendo released hardware enhanced games like Star Fox and Donkey Kong Country using chips in the cartridges that handled the graphics allowing the SNES hardware to focus solely on the code required to run the game. We all know how successful these games were, they were considered ground-breaking and helped Nintendo in transitioning to 3D several years later when they developed the Nintendo 64.
MegaWang 2000 Turbo Edition
One of the people that wondered about this, Martin Piper was so curious what the results would have been like that he took it on himself to make his own hardware expansion gear for the Commodore 64. The amateur modder went all out and significantly enhanced the original hardware using arcade Bomb Jack boards to improve the video and audio. The results were incredible, vastly improving the capabilities of the machine to such a degree that it doesn’t look anything like Commodore 64 graphically at all anymore. In fact it looks much more like arcade machine games then Commodore 64 games. He named his creation the MegaWang 2000 Turbo Edition. You can see an example of a game running on the Commodore 64 using the MegaWang 2000 Turbo Edition Hardware in the After Burner video shown above. There is also a video demonstrating Shadow of the Beast. As you can see graphically the games look very similar to the arcade version and doesn’t really resemble the Commodore 64 at all anymore except for perhaps the sound and music. The project is still a work in progress but you can buy the physical hardware for only $5,646 USD.
Relevant Links
- Martin Piper itch.io webpage [https://martin-piper.itch.io/bomb-jack-display-hardware] The MegaWang 2000 Turbo Edition explained
- Game’s that Weren’t C64 website [https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/mega-games/] Explains the idea of the Mega Game and explores the unreleased games that were promised by Imagine Software
