King's Ransom (Unreleased game, possible attempt to rescue it?)
 

Developed by ReadySoft (possibly the Abstrax team?), supposedly a sequel to Wrath of the Demon, to have been released in about 1993 on Amiga and PC.

There is an old thread from 10 years ago in the requests section about this game, but I figured I would post about it here so it gets some more attention (there still isn't a HOL entry, for instance)

I must say, this is without a doubt one of the coolest looking Amiga games I've seen. Rumors say the game was 85% complete, so I wonder if any of the old developers could be contacted so we could try to get a release of the game available? Anyone think they know how to get into contact with any of those Wrath of the Demon developers? (who I am guessing also worked on King's Ransom). It would be great if we could save such a cool looking game.

Here are all the known screens of the game so far:

http://i.imgur.com/FNSDH.png

http://i.imgur.com/XH9zL.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Hnyuz.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/4bMek.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/ftP0X.jpg

Nice looking..
Any idea if those screenshots and "completed percentage" are Amiga or PC (both?)?

desiv

It was not rumors who said it was 85% complete but* one of the programmers (Pierre Proulx):
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=28258

See post #32

Sadly, he is no longer registered.
Perhaps laffer still has a way to contact him. Or perhaps RCK has somewhere in a database the email address used to register the account.


*: or perhaps the rumors you have read have another source and Pierre Proulx cited the same source.

This game looks cool! Would be good if it could be released (uncompleted) or some clever people to complete it for us!

The person I heard it from probably got it from that source, thanks for the link.

Hopefully someone can contact Pierre or one of the other developers to see if its possible to release whatever was completed of the game.

Nice screens. Mock-ups?

Yes, hero have light leather pants only on fourth screen ;)

The hero is climbing on the rope in the fourth screen, he still has the green pants.

It doesn't look like the screens are mock ups. They said the game was 2 years in development after all.

Yes, you're right, I can see it now.

Panels have similar style to Ivanhoe:

http://i.imgur.com/CnHYK.png

Eric Heberling has a midi (for General Midi standard) on his website that he made for King's Ransom http://heberlingmusic.com/midi.html

I have made a recording of it:
King's Ransom - Dark Ages (general midi, Ensoniq MR).ogg

Sound pretty good i think, very much in the style he did for the Elder Scrolls games (Arena, Daggerfall).

Amiga Programmer profile
 

Hello everyone:

the public profile of the game programmer (Pierre Proulx) can be viewed here:

http://ca.linkedin.com/pub/pierre-proulx/28/342/235

I hope help anyone want to contact him.

anything new about this game ?

It looks pretty good, i wonder they why they didn't finish it..

I'm not sure if there is anyone still looking at this thread but let me first thank you guys for your interest in our game. As I've mentioned in an old post, King Ransom was a sequel to Wrath of the Demon made by myself and the rest of the Abstrax team. After 2 years of development, the game was unfortunately put on hold so the team could be assigned to some more pressing console projects. Regrettably, we never went back to complete it and after a few years, the Abstrax team split off so the whereabouts of the latest version of the game is very much uncertain. I possibly have some parts of the Amiga version sitting in a box in my basement but reviving that would for sure be time consuming and quite a challenging task...

Pierre Proulx
Abstrax

clearer screenshots:

http://s3.img.suchar.net/cvHTsMSfBXm...tDUWoYeZgm.jpg
http://s3.img.suchar.net/mOgJggNhqLl...rWRoWqtkQx.jpg

Thanks for posting Barbadel, looks like a very interesting game.

As always be nice to know more about the project :)
I'm assuming artwork was drawn at higher detail/resolution and converted to a limited palette. Looks like the whole screen including score panel is remapped.

Visually very impressive.

Looks stunning, I hope that one day we will have a chance to play alpha or demo of it.

Really beautiful graphics. I hope you at least try to recover and preserve whatever you can find on your old disks and drives.

Two years of developement for being canned!
Sometimes things doesn't play fair for the developer and also for the users, specialy when that about a such quality games...