So how did I find this obscure Palace Software film?
In the 12 years since the video was uploaded, it’s only received a little over 300 views. But this short film contains 12 minutes of slides and Super 8 footage documenting the creation of an unfinished game from legendary ‘80s publisher Palace Software, that released a string of critical and commercial hits for the Commodore 64 that included Cauldron, Barbarian, and The Sacred Armour of Antiriad.
I stumbled across it while searching for period-appropriate photographs of the team behind Cauldron II, the subject of my most recent video in a series I call MetroidMania, where I backtrack through the history of platform adventures to determine whether there were any Metroidvania games before Metroid.
But initially I didn’t know what the game was. In the lengthy text scroll at the end of his film, Mark Eason — who worked on the game with fellow staffer Chris Gorm — refuses to utter its name, “as it was unanimously ridicul[ed] by everyone in the office except Pete [Stone] (who commissioned it).” So there’s no way I could know it was a game that was never announced, a game that isn’t mentioned in any database or on any web forum. A game that nobody was aware had nearly existed.
I came across the final piece of the puzzle completely by accident, while chatting with former Palace programmer Richard Leinfellner about the publisher’s very first game, The Evil Dead.
The hardest part about researching game history is tracking down the people who worked on the games in the hopes they’ll be willing to tell their story. If you receive no response, you’re left wondering whether you sent the message to an email that’s no longer in use, or if they simply didn’t want to talk. Other times the person will initially sound enthusiastic, but then ghost you as soon as you send questions or try to set up a time.
Wonderfully, Leinfellner is none of those. Within minutes I get a response: “Happy to jump on a call later if you like.”
Not only does he thoroughly answer my questions to the best of his recollection, he even sends me photographs of the Palace team from his personal collection, which are sprinkled throughout this article (as well as in the text supplement to my Cauldron II video).
During our call, I ask about the circumstances behind the cancelled Halloween game that led to the creation of Cauldron. He ponders whether “cancelled” is even the right word for it.
“There’s a game around that time we looked at called Stuntman, which never saw the light of day. That was definitely cancelled. To actually say Halloween was cancelled was probably an overstatement. It probably never really started, if you know what I mean.”
Afterwards I send him the link to Mark Eason’s short film, in response to his emailing me all these photographs, while I search for any mention of a game called Stuntman on the internet, or in old UK gaming magazines via the Internet Archive. I also check in with Frank Gasking, of Games That Weren’t, but even he’s never heard of it.
Then I get a reply from Leinfellner, who tells me the video I sent is the making of Stuntman! The game would’ve involved several Hollywood action scenes, and to get the character animations just right, the team helped out by posing for reference material in rented costumes. Eason filmed them with a Super 8 and then played it back on a hand-wind film viewer that would allow going frame by frame.
Leinfellner pointed out that several of the photos he sent were also from this shoot:
“Stuntman was also the fighting picture on the roof, with the “Knight” being Matthew Tims who ran Palace Software marketing,” he elaborates. “Matthew worked with Pete and me at the Video Palace before Palace Software.”
Fittingly for a cinematic game, this particular shoot took place on the roof of the Scala Cinema, which also housed Palace Software’s office space. Eason recalls in his text scroll, “leaving to go to lunch involved walking through the back of the cinema whilst films (some notoriously rude) were being screened.”
Stuntman was a concept pitched to Stone by a journalist, and would have followed a Hollywood stuntman involved in a variety of action sequences: a fight between knights, a cowboy shoot up, planting a bomb, and a motorcycle chase inspired by the 1972 Charles Bronson film The Mechanic.
As for why Stuntman was abandoned, Eason says it was a combination of things going on in his personal life on top of the concept simply too ambitious for 1986. It would’ve needed to be a release for newer and more expensive computers Atari ST or Commodore Amiga, and “would have taken a multitude of tediously slow floppy discs to load it.”
“These old Super 8 films are all that I have left of these endeavours to get this daft game off the ground,” his text scroll concludes. “But the films are a very special glimpse of a disappeared London that, if such antics were to occur in it today they would no doubt result in Police helicopters swooping and anti-terrorist officers shooting dead the hapless actors in Hyde Park and atop Heinlein’esque rooftops.”
Happy 40th anniversary of Stuntman almost being a game.
Postscript
Mark Eason would like you to know that the music in the first half of the film was a collaboration between himself, his girlfriend Nicki, and Palace Software sound designer Richard Joseph. The rest of the collaboration can by found on the album Skinbat Scramble Volume Four on his website Alien Piers Organization, as can the music from the end of the film which comes from his album The Longtails.
He also sent along this surrealistic painting he did five years after leaving Palace using a photo he took of former coworker Dan Malone as reference.
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