Denial

I recently bought a job lot that included a cartridge box for Rally Xtra (presumably Rally X). The actual picture is printed on normal paper and just slid in to the front of the case. At first I assumed this was just someone playing at home with their own design.

However, when I opened up the Vic 20 that came with it on the inside it says "Property of Anirog Software" and the lot also included what appeared to be some original designs for some other Anirog software games.

It got me wondering whether this was actually an early design for the artwork for the unreleased Rally X game.

Does anyone know if any artwork was prepared for this game?

https://ibb.co/mn7dxQ
https://ibb.co/gNNNP5

Oops obviously not attached picture properly. I will try again tonight.

I've just corrected the links to be clickable, I don't think it allows third party showing like that.

Anyhow, before seeing the photos, I was expecting you to say you were in Australia, there's a fair few examples of "different" artwork like that for certain Commodore released games (such as Clowns, Star Battle, and Kickman). But the back of the sleeve says Austria. Interesting. I take it you ONLY got the box, there was no cartridge inside?

No, packaging only I'm afraid. I was nervous as anything waiting for it to be delivered just in case there was a cartridge but I knew that was highly unlikely.

Interestingly there was a Radar Ratrace empty cartridge case in there which is why I intially thought someone might be messing around making a bit of a home project.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought Rally-X was in fact released but in Japan only and only for a brief period of time.

It was but as far as I understand there was no artwork for the packaging.

Commodore only had a licence to issue the game in Japan hence it was reworked as Radar Race for the European and North American release for legal reasons.

Above should obviously read Radar Ratrace

Just looking at the photos of the artwork, it seems to have been printed on a colour inkjet printer (I think I can see the print-head banding). If so, this would put it far past the date the cartridge was actually released. It still makes for an interesting mystery though. It is possible that Commodore Germany had bought out - or been transferred - a lot of old warehoused VIC-20 software (possibly from Japan) in the late-1980s/early-90s and needed a way of clearing it out. They might have recycled some new-old-stock VIC-20 silver cartridge boxes, printed out some very generic labels for the German marker (by this time colour ink-jets would have been around) and sold or given them away as promotional bundles to sell off old VIC-20 stock?

It does seem that Commodore Germany, like Commodore UK did a lot of innovative things independent of the main US company.

andyryan wrote:It was but as far as I understand there was no artwork for the packaging.

Wasn't aware of that. But it makes sense now that I think of Pac Man which became 'Jelly Monsters'. AFAIK, it too had no artwork.

Commodore only had a licence to issue the game in Japan hence it was reworked as Radar Rat Race for the European and North American release for legal reasons.

This I knew.

In fact, more information has come forward in general to suggest that Commodore may not even have had an agreement with Namco to produce the home versions that were released in Japan. More perhaps possibly they just thought they could get away with it.