Tag Archives: Epyx

Barbarian II: The Dungeon of Drax, Commodore 64

The sequel to 1987’s cult hit Barbarian, Barbarian II: The Dungeon of Drax is a similar fighting game, but with more variety than the first game, and the possibility of exploring the actual world by moving from screen to screen (“wow! What a technological advancement!“). Barbarian II was first released in 1988 by Palace Software. The game was later licensed by Epyx for distribution in North America under the title of “Axe of Rage“.

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Barbarian, Commodore 64

Palace Software‘s Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior is a fondly-remembered and controversial one-on-one fighting game from 1987, where two gladiatorial combatants slug it out to the death in a variety of different locations. Actually, there are two different versions of this game, each with different backgrounds. The first version has a throne room and then a pit. The second version has a meadow and a clearing in a forest. I’m not sure why there are two versions of this game, but that definitely seems to be the case.

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Summer Games, Sega Master System

Summer Games on the Sega Master System is a cut-down conversion of the classic Commodore 64 sports game from Epyx. It was ported by Sega and first released in 1988.

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Thing Bounces Back, Commodore 64

Thing Bounces Back is the 1987 sequel to Thing On A Spring and it is more of the same platforming action, starring ‘Thing‘, the spring-with-a-head-and-feet, and similar mechanics to the first game.

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Mindroll, Amiga

Mindroll is a 16-bit conversion of Stavros Fasoulas‘ classic Commodore 64 ball-rolling maze game, Quedex. It was converted by Silent Software and published in North America for the Amiga and PC by Epyx in 1990. As far as I know it wasn’t released in the UK or Europe, which is strange considering that the game originated there.

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Blue Lightning, Atari Lynx

This arcade-style, third-person combat flight game was developed by Epyx and released exclusively for the Atari Lynx in 1989. Blue Lightning was actually a launch title for the North American release of the Lynx.

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Rogue, Atari ST

The Atari ST version of the classic dungeon-crawler, Rogue, is arguably the best conversion of the game out there. It was developed by A.I. Design and published by Epyx in 1986 and combines the best bits from the original with new graphics and a few new features of its own.

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Rogue, PC

Rogue is an influential dungeon-crawling Role-Playing Game originally created by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman (with later contributions by Ken Arnold) for Unix-based mainframes in 1980.

The original version of Rogue used the ASCII character set (text symbols) to create the world, and that is what you can see here in this first commercial version of game, published by Epyx in 1985.

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Jumpman Junior, Atari 8-bit

Jumpman Junior is the Atari 8-bit cartridge version of Randy Glover‘s classic 8-bit platform game, Jumpman. It was first published by Epyx in 1983.

Since the game came on cartridge the number of levels has been reduced, down to 12, but they are at least all-new levels and not recycled levels from the disk version.

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Impossible Mission, Atari 7800

Dennis Caswell‘s classic Impossible Mission was released for the Atari 7800 in 1988 and it is a decent adaptation of the Commodore 64 original.

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