Whatever Happened to Guardians?

Carl Forhan of Songbird Productions was in contact with Guardians developer Tom Schenck on the Lynx Developers Mailing list. "[He] was part of Knight Technologies and one of the developers of Guardians. He did indicate the game was coming along. It wasn't just a slideshow, but it was nowhere near completion, either. Unfortunately he did not have the source or a demo, nor did he have any idea what happened to it..."

On the Atari Forum, Chris_Lynx1989 writes: "This game was only around 30% complete (unlike the fraudulent claims of the mag EGM saying it was 90% and going to be released in like august 1992 in their big splash on it in the may or june '92 issue)."

Tom Schenck elaborates: "The Guardians: Storm over Doria was dropped at about 30% completion. We only had a few levels built. The multiplayer nature and the cart cost were the reasons. I keep hoping, but have not found, any backup copies of the source code or the artwork. It probably exists on a hard drive somewhere, if someone gets ahold of the Amiga 2500 which had the stuff."

"The EPROMS were of a slide show with 4 pictures that was produced for the '92 CES show. I would imagine they were erased. EGM never saw a running copy of the game. Yes, they did "preview" the game. They made it all up. No-one at Knight Technologies even spoke with them. I don't know if Telegames people did."

"The game was developed to the point of having a central map screen, several characters, and a few simple AI monsters running around. There were a few dungeons and a couple of towns. No coherent story was in place. We had a menu system and missile system. There was a little bit of combat available. I could easily reproduce the entire game (without the artwork) in about 2 to 3 weeks now. What is lacking is the storyline. This is the single hardest part of an RPG, just as in a Fantasy novel. Keeping the universe consistent and interesting."

(Read Tom Schenck's newsgroup posting.)

There is no ROM image (to our knowledge) floating around, so getting clean screenshots is very difficult. However, we have taken some scans and cleaned them up as best as possible to make them look as they might on a real Lynx.

Guardians does look somewhat similar to the upcoming Songbird release of Distant Lands...

Thanks go to Carl Forhan, Garth, and chris_lynx1989 for info and images.