Blazing Barrels - Memories
Icom Simulations in the US were well known for their Mac-style icon driven graphic adventure games like The Uninvited, Deja Vu and Deja Vu 2.
Blazing Barrels was developed by their new UK (Liverpool) office, and was a sideways scrolling arcade game similar to Namco's Rolling Thunder coin-op but set in the Wild West. Icom were originally contracted to produce versions for the ST, Amiga and Mac but the Mac version was dropped almost immediately.
The game scrolled from left to right, and the player controlled a cowboy who walked on the top level but who could jump over the railings and enter the lower half of the screen when necessary. They basically became involved in various shoot-outs with bad guys as the game scrolled along.
Blazing Barrels never really progressed much beyond a demo level on the Atari ST. It was playable, but it wasn't an outstanding game design by any stretch of the imagination.
Example screens
Magazine adverts
The first advert didn't include any screenshots. The second advert did, but had dropped the Macintosh version. Unfortunately, both adverts were extremely premature. Even if the game had been finished for the ST and Amiga, it was unlikely to have seen a release until at least 6 months after the adverts were published!
The Telecomsoft marketing department was going through a phase of using classic black & white photographs to promote Firebird titles in 1988, and they published two early adverts for Blazing Barrels to coincide with the 1988 PC Show at Olympia.
After using Humphrey Bogart to advertise Graftgold's Soldier of Fortune, this time they used Ronald Regan from his Hollywood days (dressed as a cowboy) saying It sure as hell gets my vote!. At least this time there was a tenuous link between the photo in the advert and the game!