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This is one of those games
that was nothing more than a rumor for a long time. The
game was talked about and was in pamphlets for a long
time, but the game itself never surfaced. About two years
ago, a label even appeared, but there was still no sign of
the game itself until the Classic Gaming Expo 1999, when
the programmer of the game, Steve Woita, showed up with
cart in hand to show it to the world. After clearing it
with Jim Davis and the Paws, Inc. company, limited
permission was given for the distribution of this ROM.
(Please see the Readme with the ROM for the full
details of the distribution agreement)
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This is quite an
entertaining game, which appears to have been another
victim of the Videogame Crash. The programmer, Steve
Woita, was the same author who produced TAZ and Quadrun
for the 2600. From the information he game to the Classic
Gaming Expo people, he only had two months of work
completed on this game before Atari was sold to the
Trammels - and we all know how they "helped" Atari by
elimiating the videogames division. However, for two
months of work, this game is amazingly complete. There are
at least 5 completely different screens in the game, each
with its own characters and goal: catching hamburgers,
ducking flowerpots, avoiding Odie in the chimney, a freaky
all-Odie screen where you hop from Odie head to Odie head, and the final
screen when you finally catch Nermal.
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It's unclear what is missing
from this ROM compared to what the programmer had in mind
for the final version, due to the fact this game is
completely playable. One thing is clearly incomplete
however - on the screens where you need to catch the
Hamburgers for points, Garfield will catch them whether
he's jumping with his mouth open or if he's simply just
standing there. All the available screens with that
exception seem complete - you can duck the flowerpots by
holding DOWN on the control pad, Nermal can be caught and
the game will continue, and the controls themselves are
complete. We can only speculate what other goodies the
programmer had in store if he had the chance to finish the
game... |
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In complete contrast to this
current era of lawsuits and companies unwilling to give
the public any possible was of playing these old games,
Jim Davis himself has given approval to a limited
distribution of the ROM code of this game! So far, this
is the only occasion I am aware of that a copyright holder
has given permission for the non-profit distribution of a
prototype. Now if only we could convince the Rocky and
Bullwinkle people and the Pink Panther people to do the
same, we'd have more great prototypes like this one!
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