Hydrogenese – A game missing for 35 years appears as a preview for the Commodore 64!

Year after year we usually go on about the latest games and unreleased titles seeing the light of day for the very first time, well here are with another unreleased game for you to play test, as thanks to our good friends GamesThatWeren’t, you too can try out a preview download of the unreleased game of ‘Hydrogenese’. A game that was not only developed by X-Ample, who produced lots of demos and games going back as far as 1988(?). But GTW are quoted as saying for Hydrogenese ” this is a brilliant and early look at what could have been an amazing space shooter!”.

In brief here is what the excellent GamesThatWeren’t website says about the game. “So what happened to the original game and why was it cancelled? Originally the game was planned to be part of a 25.000 DM contest by disk magazine “Game On”, but it wasn’t finished in time. As a result, Helge didn’t get to finish the game and it was split up into several other games and finished by other programmers. Tales of Boon, Darksword and Greystorm used the jump and run levels. Parsec used some of the shoot em up levels, and Hyper Aggressive used the puzzle sequences and some of the music”. 

“Thomas’ music was split across many other games in the end. Sadly it was believed that the original incarnation of the game was fully lost, but we held out hope that it would show up some day. Well in September 2024, that day finally came when Success + The Ruling Company recovered a preview of the game showing the stone level, thanks to CBA”.

• Missing for 35 years, a preview of the long lost Hydrogenese on the Commodore 64. In addition to the shooter part of Hydrogenese being recovered, parts of the platformer elements were also saved. These have been added to the download thanks to CBA/SCS-TRC.

Links :1) Further Details