Bandersnatch

Title : Bandersnatch

Publisher : Imagine Software Ltd

Release Year:

No. Players: 1

Entry Type: Arcade: Adventure

Machine Type: 48K

Availability: Never released

Comments: Perhaps the most (in)famous of all the Spectrum unreleased games.#Probably the best article on the story behind the game can be found in issue 12 of Crash in The Biggest Commercial Break of Them All (available on the on-line version), which tells the story about the television program which charted Imagine's downfall.#Briefly, Imagine were one of the most publicity-hungry companies of their day. From early 1984 they began publicising their so-called Megagames, Bandersnatch for the Spectrum and Psyclapse for the Commodore 64, and a number of different adverts appeared during the year for the games in the computer press.#Imagine had said that they had reached the limit of the capabilities of the Spectrum and planned to release the game with a hardware add-on which would increase the Spectrum's memory. Various reports suggested that the game would costs anywhere between £20 to £40.#The game though was never finished and Imagine collapsed during about the Autumn of 1984.#On Games That Weren't, Marc Dawson comments that the Megagames had reached "quite an advanced stage and looked incredible"”#The game never appeared despite the fact that Ian Heatherington and Dave Lawson formed a company called Fireiron (nb - I have also seen reports saying this company was called Finchspeed) and planned to release the game for Sinclair Research for the QL either on ROM cartridge or Microdrive.#Some of the programmers who worked on Bandersnatch went on to form Denton Designs and their first game Gift from the Gods was described as a "direct descendant" of the ill-fated Megagame. The central character in Gift was said to be very similar to the one in Bandersnatch.#The game also made an appearance for the Atari ST in the guise of Brattacus, released by Psygnosis, a company also formed by messrs Heatherington and Lawson. Marc Dawson comments on GTW that Brattacus was a mixture of Bandersnatch and Psyclapse.

Updated On : May 25, 2020