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  • Joined: 19 Nov 2015
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The Godfather for Master System (Unreleased)
Post Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2023 9:01 am
Godfather huh? Alright then, I'll see what I can do. Thanks for the suggestions.


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*ADMIN EDIT*: Everything below this line has been edited and amended on 2023/01/11 by Admins. messages from this topics were extracted from "Most noteworthy lost media?" https://www.smspower.org/forums/19271 so we can create a definitive topic about The Godfather especially as we might be making progress on finding this game.

Other topics mentioning The Godfather:

SMS The Godfather reviewed in German magazine?
https://www.smspower.org/forums/6965
including Screenshots:
https://www.smspower.org/forums/6965-SMSTheGodfatherReviewedInGermanMagazine#327...

Unreleased/Rumoured SMS Games
https://www.smspower.org/forums/9485-UnreleasedRumouredSMSGames#56220

Godfather advert for master system
https://www.smspower.org/forums/10932

Do you know if this game exist ?
https://www.smspower.org/forums/4127

(Even though for decades we actively pushed against people uploading to temporary third-party hosting (e.g. imageshack) and often manually reupload images, some of those old threads have missing attachments which we'll look into recovering. Please use site attachments and not external hosting for images, thank you!).
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Post Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2023 8:29 am
VenomRush1997 wrote
Godfather huh? Alright then, I'll see what I can do. Thanks for the suggestions.


https://lostmediawiki.com/The_Godfather_(Unreleased_Sega_Master_System_movie_tie...
The article is now live (unless they remove it for whatever reason, I've had that happen overnight before). A few questions come to mind though

Where did the cover art come from? I'm sure it was from a magazine, but there wasn't a source to it on the Sega Retro page.

When someone said there were "videos", did they mean there were videos covering the topic of the game, or is there footage of it somewhere? Because I could not find either of them anywhere on Google.
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Post Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2023 9:21 am
Wow, it was in this thread: https://www.smspower.org/forums/9485-UnreleasedRumouredSMSGames

Linkt to the video that seems to be gone... http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3692105458573535685&hl=en
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Post Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2023 12:05 pm
kusfo wrote
Wow, it was in this thread: https://www.smspower.org/forums/9485-UnreleasedRumouredSMSGames

Linkt to the video that seems to be gone... http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3692105458573535685&hl=en


The thread doesn't have the boxart scan, looks like the original link got taken down. Someone has to have a copy of that gameplay footage right? Maybe one of the admins on the forum?
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Post Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2023 3:27 pm
I remember what footage that was. It came from a Dutch TV show called 'Power Play'. I reckon all the episodes (approx. 20) are on Youtube, so it's just a matter of tracking down the correct episode.
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Post Posted: Thu Jan 05, 2023 3:24 pm
Here's the segment from TROS Power Play broadcasted on January 22, 1993.



I should re-digitize the VHS tapes some day. The original files are in CIF (352×288) MPEG-1 :-P
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Post Posted: Thu Jan 05, 2023 3:50 pm
Kjell wrote
Here's the segment from TROS Power Play broadcasted on January 22, 1993.



I should re-digitize the VHS tapes some day. The original files are in CIF (352×288) MPEG-1 :-P


Amazing!!
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Tros
Post Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2023 3:04 pm
TROS Power Play is the best I could watch many times I watched it
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Post Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2023 3:08 pm
Don Corleone jumping balconies and sniping his opponents while hanging from ladders I'm sure is a faithful representation of the film. :D
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Post Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2023 6:39 pm
Wonderful ! I had never seen this footage before.
Attaching the video (one can use youtube-dl to grab those).

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Post Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2023 12:05 pm
Kjell sent me a slightly better version of the Godfather video:

"Just in case, here's the Godfather clip without re-encoding ( couldn't trim this exactly as the YouTube video since MPEG-1 can only be split on keyframes ). Still terrible quality but slightly better than the YouTube version."

Thank you!
The Godfather.zip (6.75 MB)

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Post Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2023 12:19 pm
I'll post a call on Twitter to try to find developers for this.
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Post Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2023 4:03 pm
Bock wrote
I'll post a call on Twitter to try to find developers for this.
The game was going to be published by US Gold so it's likely it was developed by Tiertex or Probe.
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Post Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2023 4:14 pm
Total speculation, but the animations and graphics remind me of Indiana Jones, so I'll vote for Tiertex.
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Post Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2023 12:45 pm
It would be amazing to find a prototype or ROM. I had heard about this one but like many others hadn't seen this video. Fingers Crossed
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Post Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2023 4:20 pm
Nice to see some progress on this! Who knows it'll finally be uncovered.
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Existing Medias Recap
Post Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2023 11:40 am
Attaching files that were previously in other topics.

Screenshots from a German review:
https://www.smspower.org/forums/6965

Extract from this catalogue:
https://www.smspower.org/Scans/USGold-Catalogue-TheBestActionYouCanBuyForYourSeg...
godfather1_702.jpg (114.35 KB)
godfather1_702.jpg
godfather2_149.jpg (94.54 KB)
godfather2_149.jpg
godfather3_297.jpg (101.49 KB)
godfather3_297.jpg
godfather_ms.jpg (333.77 KB)
godfather_ms.jpg

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Recap of first reactions to my call
Post Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2023 12:00 pm
I posted this a few days ago:

📢 We are looking for any info/data about the Sega 8-bit version of "The Godfather" by Creative Materials / US Gold. It was near-finished in 1992-1993 but went unreleased. Do you know anyone near that dev team?
https://twitter.com/ocornut/status/1612426611596427271

Some of the interesting reactions:

Frank Cifaldi: (https://gamehistory.org)
Found someone who tested it on LinkedIn, I can message him if you'd like [...] Oh you mention Viking Child in the replies, I'm talking to the Imagitec CEO right now so I'll get to that too. I think they were cross-platform on everything for that and possibly Daemonsgate.
[...] Ok. Got a likely project manager name from the tester and messaged him. He also suspects it might have been Tiertex doing the conversion so I'll look for them next
On that note I'll bet Tiertex did Die Hard 2 also
Neil Harding says he didn't work on it, though he did do Rad Mobile SMS (which he doesn't have) and Prime [Malibu comics game, came out on SNES] for Game Gear which he MIGHT have
Also he doesn't remember the project at all, if it was at Tiertex at all


@MrTalida
https://twitter.com/MrTalida/status/1612716308658790400
I have a cache of various disks to go through, including this one who's label suggests it contains some dpaint background art files for the Sega Master System version of The Godfather. It'll be a few weeks until I can check if any data has survived, but I'll let you know.
(See attachment below)

Games That Weren't @fgasking
https://twitter.com/fgasking/status/1612449727710126081
Commodore Format once reported that Software Creations were working on it - home computer versions at least
https://twitter.com/fgasking/status/1612449940482965504
I'll reach out to Tony Porter to see if he might know, as he was producing at least the home computer versions. Will let you know if I hear anything back.

Jordan Bakker suggested to contact Netherlands media archivists: Willem Hilhorst: as the clip is apparently aired in the Netherlands do you guys have any record of it?" [..]
Willem: "Hi Omar! Please send an email [...] most likely have this episode and I can see what I can do for you!"

Willem looked:
"[...] I'm one of the people working on our dutch video games archive at Sound & Vision, here in Hilversum, the Netherlands. Our aim is to preserve all forms of the dutch public broadcasters, from radio to television as well as more modern and digital media forms, including videogames. 

I went ahead and searched through our archive, and while we have a couple of episodes of TROS Power Play, some of which are in high quality, unfortunately the episode that was broadcast on the January 22, 1993 is not part of our selection. According to my research this most likely was episode 7 of the 19-episode run of the series. The series itself consistent of three seasons. I have also been unable (with a quick search I should add) to find any online copy of episode 7. This doesn't necessarily mean that we don't have the episode (for example, it may be part of our video-archive and hasn't been digitized yet, but for now I am unfortunately unable to help you. 

However, I was personally unaware that we were missing so many episodes of this series, so I've made it a point to send out a request to AVROTROS (the broadcaster still exists here in the Netherlands) as well as contacting a few of the people who worked on the show. Most of them are still active in the dutch media landscape, so there's a chance that they may still have a copy of the show somewhere. However, this request will take some time due to our current busy schedule, [...] If I do happen to find anything regarding this episode, or The Godfather game that you are looking for, I'll let you know. [...]
If you ever need other specific segments or stuff from TROS Power Play or have questions about Dutch videogames, feel free to reach out to us!"


*EDIT* Kjell mentioned it is Episode 9 (not 7) as the show went from weekly to bi-weekly in 1993.

@drtune I did the PC version of Godfather https://mobygames.com/game/dos/godfather/techinfo but IDK who would have programmed an 8-bit sega version for Creative Materials
https://twitter.com/drtune/status/1612709181513170947

@digitalfoundry: My memory is foggy on this one, but @JazRignall may have played it?
https://twitter.com/digitalfoundry/status/1612538418289844233

Jaz: Hm. I vaguely remember seeing it, but I can't remember where. It was similar-ish to Dick Tracy IIRC, and seemed to have nothing to do with the Godfather at all. Basically a pretty lame platformer. Which is maybe why it got canned?

@thubeauv: The Planned Megadrive version should be a Port of the Amiga Version from softgold..

@stephenfinn3: Looks very similar to oceans darkman game.

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Post Posted: Thu Jan 12, 2023 3:26 am
I'm so glad the search for this is actually going somewhere!

The article I wrote for the website was deleted because they didn't think it was noteworthy enough, glad you guys are proving them wrong!
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Post Posted: Thu Jan 12, 2023 9:29 am
VenomRush1997 wrote
I'm so glad the search for this is actually going somewhere!

The article I wrote for the website was deleted because they didn't think it was noteworthy enough, glad you guys are proving them wrong!


Maybe Unseen64 would be interested in your article? They don't seem to have anything for The Godfather.
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Post Posted: Thu Jan 12, 2023 11:49 am
segasonic wrote
VenomRush1997 wrote
I'm so glad the search for this is actually going somewhere!

The article I wrote for the website was deleted because they didn't think it was noteworthy enough, glad you guys are proving them wrong!


Maybe Unseen64 would be interested in your article? They don't seem to have anything for The Godfather.


I have not done anything with Unseen64, they're probably much different than LMW

I'm going to contact an admin on the latter to see if they can restore my article now that we have a lot more information than when I wrote it, I never expected this search to actually take off the way it did.
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Post Posted: Thu Jan 12, 2023 8:43 pm
Quote

@thubeauv: The Planned Megadrive version should be a Port of the Amiga Version from softgold..

Note that Flashback was originally an adaptation of The Godfather developed for the Mega Drive, although the Amiga version was released first.
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Post Posted: Mon May 15, 2023 9:10 pm
Halfway into the year, no leads or new discoveries huh? Well, that's just how Lost Media usually goes...
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Post Posted: Mon May 15, 2023 9:21 pm
I've checked the Dutch media archive, it doesn't look like it was updated since. The Power Play episode sadly isn't available from their site yet.
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Post Posted: Mon May 29, 2023 6:24 am
No new leads on the prototype yet either eh? I thought someone had a floppy disk containing the background graphics?
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