Tyger! Tyger! - Memories

Gary Liddon was an ex-Newsfield magazine journalist who had spent the previous few years before he started coding Tyger! Tyger! reviewing games for Zzap!64 magazine.

The game title appears to be a reference to the famous William Blake poem of the same name, but there is little else to connect the game to this literary prose!

The game itself was a simple arcade platform game, where you jumped around (or swam) through different levels, avoiding nasties or shooting them to gain coins that could then be spent in shops upgrading items. For some strange reason, the shop keeper looked remarkably like Groucho Marks!

Tyger! Tyger! also had a passing resemblance to the coin-op Black Tiger, which might have been one of the reasons why the game failed to be released. Another reason was that the game didn't get beyond the 40-50% finished mark! At one point, I can clearly remember Gary Liddon paying visits to Telecomsoft's New Oxford Street offices and trying to do some coding there in an effort to make some progress. Unfortunately, progress was slow and the game just fizzled out in the end. I don't remember it being officially cancelled, but it's demise was probably confirmed once MicroProse bought Telecomsoft.

Being honest, the development versions of the game weren't particularly special back in 1988, and seeing the game again recently hasn't really changed my mind. The graphics are neat (drawn by Paul 'Dok' Docherty) but the gameplay was always a bit simple and lacking in real challenge. However, it's not fair to pass final judgement because the game was never finished!

The source-code for Tyger! Tyger! (written using the PDS development system originally co-designed by Jez San and Bits founder, Fouad Katan) was passed on to some C64 coders a few years ago, and they have been able to ressurect an old development version of the game from November 1988! Full details of how this happened can be found on Frank Gasking's Games that weren't C64 website. Frank has also given permission for the download to be made available from here!