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Most ported computer games which weren’t on home consoles


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Out of curiosity, I was looking into what computer games were the most ported, but didn’t end up on home consoles despite any popularity they had. Might be missing some examples, but here’s what I came across so far:

 

Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz


Rogue


Football Manager


Planetfall


The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy


NetHack


Hamurabi


Strange Odyssey


OpenTTD


Suspended

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This is the moment when I remember that the US NES received multiple Wizardry games and The Bards Tale.

 

I mean, yes, the modern era is full of computer/console releases, but that's not quite the same as the sheer number of weird titles that got NES versions ages ago.

 

Back to the thread!

 

... the original Adventure (Colossal Cave) has never been ported to a console, as far as I know.

 

In Japan, the Saturn got at least the first Zork -- was it only the first game to get ported?  (Not counting the version in Black Ops)

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How do you propose to play text adventures  with a gamepad? It's really not a great mystery why these games didn't get ported.

 

So far Bruce Lee is the only example which kinda makes sense. The rest, aside from IF, were games unsuitable for consoles for assorted reasons, eg LSL too risky,  Nethack open source, Hamurabi too niche, etc...

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What I find more interesting is the amount of arcade games that were only ported to computers. But there's also a "good" reason for that, since most of these games were considered too old to be ported to 'competent' consoles like the Genesis and the SNES. Also publishers like Ocean, Elite, US Gold, and Activision would port everything to most computers. Sometimes the NES got ports that were adapted (sometimes quite radically) to the platform (Rygar, Strider, most Capcom ports actually) while computers got them as is (well, at least it was the intent ?).

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Of the titles on that list, the only one with potential is Rogue (Nethack is way too complex for a console game and there would be licensing issues). I suspect the volume of changes required (e.g. the absence of the ASCII character set on consoles, complete redesign of the UI) made it cost prohibitive. 

 

Hamurabi was far too old to be considered; I have seen source code for that game for the PDP-8!  

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3 hours ago, jhd said:

I suspect the volume of changes required (e.g. the absence of the ASCII character set on consoles, complete redesign of the UI) made it cost prohibitive. 

The later versions of Rogue, the ones released on 8/16 bit micros, have gfx tiles and simplified UI which you could possibly navigate with joypad. But even so, this game really wasn't that great fit for consoles, that's why Japanese went with their own take on roguelikes - Fatal Labirynth, Torneko, etc.

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4 hours ago, roots.genoa said:

What I find more interesting is the amount of arcade games that were only ported to computers. But there's also a "good" reason for that, since most of these games were considered too old to be ported to 'competent' consoles like the Genesis and the SNES. Also publishers like Ocean, Elite, US Gold, and Activision would port everything to most computers. Sometimes the NES got ports that were adapted (sometimes quite radically) to the platform (Rygar, Strider, most Capcom ports actually) while computers got them as is (well, at least it was the intent ?).

The main UK publishers often 'had' to buy the rights to convert some rather obscure Arcade titles, when they went after the big name titles for conversion, they came as part of the deal. 

 

So we ended up with conversions of games nobody had even heard of, let alone played here in the UK. 

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13 hours ago, TheDevil'sCompass said:

 

Barbarian/Death Sword (though it has since been ported to consoles by the programmer)

 

The third installment appears to of been planned with a SNES version in mind.. 

 

' in an  interview with Super Gamer (July 1994), Rob Stevens spoke about when he was going to be assigned the project to work on for the Super Nintendo, but it never happened after Nintendo would not allow heads to be chopped off or any bare breasted women in the game."

 

https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/2020/07/super-barbarian-amiga-st-pc-c64/

 

But even the home micro versions never made it, but the above does suggest why the original and sequel never made it to the  NES or SNES. 

 

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Lunar Lander

Star Trek

These were ported from minicomputers to every sort of micro in the early days.

 

Edit: Star Trek did make it to home consoles after all, in the form of Star Raiders for Atari 5200 and 2600.

Edited by ClausB
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On 7/6/2022 at 2:20 AM, electricmastro said:

Football Manager

Do you refer to the Kevin Toms' game, or the genre in overall? I suppose that 80's consoles had too little amount of memory (*) and storage options for a management game to make sense, but once you move to the Genesis (64K RAM)/SNES (128K RAM) generation and newer, there were console versions of that era of football management games. Per Mobygames, the first console game about football management may have been Sensible Soccer: European Champions on the Amiga CD32 (1993), shortly followed by Zico Soccer on the SNES in 1994, and then came FIFA, Premier Manager, Player Manager, Tactical Soccer etc in 1995 on all the other consoles.

 

The Kevin Toms' game was rather limited already when it was new and current. There was a FM2 expansion which added a little more depth, but also made the game more clumsy to play. Still to this day, it appears that he is releasing the original Football Manager on modern smartphones and in browser, pretty much unchanged from 40 years ago. I suppose it works just like playing Ludo still works for a straightforward board game with few options and rules, but it is a bit too simplistic for my taste.

 

I was more of a fan about The Boss (Champions! a.k.a. Soccer Boss) which had less fancy graphics but somehow had more of a depth. Apparently there was an issue with sorting on the C64 which caused that version to only have 5 teams per division while the others had many more.

 

(*) Of course something like the NES could include extra RAM and storage options on the cartridge if they needed more than 2K RAM to work with. The SMS had 8K RAM which is almost half of what a ZX81 with 16K expansion has. I'm fairly sure the VIC-20 version required 16K expansion too, for certain at least 8K, meaning any 1980's console with less than 16K user available RAM probably was not in the market for a football management game unless you could could add more memory through the cartridge.

Edited by carlsson
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Yeah. The Atari 5200 had 16K RAM but was never released in Europe so that would be a moot point. There's the Colecovision with 1K RAM and 16K VRAM which possibly could have been a target for Football Manager since it is low on graphics. All older consoles would have been too inferior, and there was a gap of 3 years between the Colecovision and the NES/SMS. Also with the newer consoles there was licensing schemes, meaning that Addictive Games would have had to license a port to one of the newer consoles, while they could release anything they wanted for DOS/Amiga/Atari ST a few years later, regardless how outdated it might be.

 

That last bit of detail might be particularly important: many computer games may not have been fully up to standards of what console manufacturers wanted to see on their systems, trying to steer away from the "Atari 2600 syndrome". I know that the Famicom in Japan didn't have any hardware lock so it has a lot of games of varying quality.

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Chuckie Egg actually makes sense, though there were numerous lesser known but still very fun similar games on the micros (eg Mad Nurse off top of my head).

 

But the thing to remember is that the heyday of micros (1982-1987) was sort of a black hole for the consoles, seeing as Atari et al have never really got their act together after the crash, and Japanese devs were churning out countless hits and didn't need many ports (especially from Europe) for their consoles.

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16 minutes ago, zzip said:

How about "Hunt The Wumpus"?    Seemed like every computer with a BASIC interpreter got a port.

Yeah, but that's because it was a pretty basic game anybody could knock out to exercise their 1337 coding skills. A bit like Hamurabi. Not sure it's something people would like to pay good money for to play on their mostly arcade-oriented consoles.

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More mass-ported computer games:

 

Death Sword - 12:

 

Amiga (1988), Amstrad CPC (1987), Apple II (1988), Atari 8-bit (1992), Atari ST (1987), BBC Micro (1988), Commodore 64 (1987), DOS (1988), Electron (1988), iPad (2012), iPhone (2012) and ZX Spectrum (1987)

 

Gunship - 12:

 

Amiga (1989), Amstrad CPC (1987), Atari ST (1986), Commodore 128 (1986), Commodore 64 (1986), DOS (1987), FM Towns (1990), MSX (1989), PC-88 (1990), PC-98 (1989), Sharp X68000 (1990) and ZX Spectrum (1987)

 

Captain Blood - 10:

 

Amiga (1988), Amstrad CPC (1988), Apple IIgs (1989), Atari ST (1988), Commodore 64 (1988), DOS (1988), Macintosh (1989), Thomson MO (1988), Thomson TO (1988) and ZX Spectrum (1989)

 

Harrier Mission - 10:

 

Amiga (1987), Amstrad CPC (1985), Atari 8-bit (1985), Atari ST (1987), BBC Micro (1985), Commodore 16, Plus/4 (1985), Commodore 64 (1985), DOS (1987), Electron (1985) and MSX (1985)

 

Joe Blade - 10:

 

Amiga (1988), Amstrad CPC (1987), Atari 8-bit (1988), Atari ST (1988), BBC Micro (1988), Commodore 64 (1987), DOS (1990), Electron (1988), MSX (1986) and ZX Spectrum (1987)

 

Superstar Indoor Sports - 10:

 

Amiga (1987), Amstrad CPC (1987), Apple II (1988), Atari ST (1988), BBC Micro (1988), Commodore 16, Plus/4 (1988), Commodore 64 (1987), DOS (1987), Electron (1988) and ZX Spectrum (1987)

 

Xenon - 10:

 

Amiga (1988), Amstrad CPC (1988), Antstream (2019), Arcade (1988), Atari ST (1988), BlackBerry (2013), Commodore 64 (1989), DOS (1988), MSX (1988) and ZX Spectrum (1988)

 

Text-heavy games:

 

Cutthroats - 13

 

Deadline - 13

 

The Pawn - 13

 

Starcross - 13

 

Wishbringer - 13

 

The Witness - 13

 

Ballyhoo - 12

 

Brian Clough's Football Fortunes - 12

 

Enchanter - 12

 

The Guild of Thieves - 12

 

Ingrid's Back! - 12

 

Suspect - 12

 

Corruption - 11

 

Gnome Ranger - 11

 

Hacker - 11

 

Infidel - 11

 

Jewels of Darkness - 11

 

Jinxter - 11

 

Knight Orc - 11

 

Lancelot - 11

 

Leather Goddesses of Phobos - 11

 

Seastalker - 11

 

Silicon Dreams - 11

 

Sorcerer - 11

 

Temple of Apshai Trilogy - 11

 

Time and Magik: The Trilogy - 11

 

Granny's Garden - 10

 

Hollywood Hijinx - 10

 

Moonmist - 10

 

Murder on the Atlantic - 10

 

Spellbreaker - 10

Edited by electricmastro
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Death Sword - it's actually Barbarian, already mentioned above itt.

Gunship, Cpt Blood, Harrier Mission - typically complex "computer games" which rarely made their way to consoles

Joe Blade - budget game. Very popular but also kinda rubbish.

Superstar Indoor Sports, Xenon - I guess could qualify but the former wasn't really that great and Xenon also would have stiff competition

 

Producing carts was much more expensive than tapes or disks so console publishers had to be a bit more careful with their releases.

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