Woodshoot (partially lost Commodore 64 "Combat"-esque game; 1995)

The "WELCOME" image that is seen at the beginning of the game.

Status: Partially Lost

Woodshoot is a Commodore 64 game made sometime around 1995 that was programmed by Big User, and has music composed by Big Digi. The game is rather similar to Combat for the Atari 2600, albeit with more stuff to offer such as a large play area, and more detailed graphics, albeit with smaller tanks to play as. In the day levels, it plays like the Atari 2600 game almost note-to-note, but in the night levels, there is a realistic thunder sound that plays throughout to give it a different atmosphere than the day levels. Interestingly enough, this game also features a cracktro, indicating that someone at some cracking group found the game back in 1995, or later. What kind of method the cracking group used in particular to find the game is still unknown to this day.

While the game looks to have been completed, nobody really seems to know for sure. When trying to look up both of them, it will mostly lead to unrelated results, but on CSDb, there are listings for both of them. Big User was reportedly part of Airwolf-Team from 1994 to 1995, then switching to Fairlight, then to FLP-Group, and finally to Protovision, where he was a coder, as well as making graphics, and also being a "webmaster", which presumably means he might've made some webpages back in the day. Meanwhile Big Digi doesn't seem to be in any other group than FLP-Group, where he/she was a coder. However though, nobody really knows if they were responsible for this game, or not, and there's no evidence suggesting they made this as it's not listed in any of their CSDb entries.

If it's not them, then it is most likely that it was going to be some budget game released a year after official support for the Commodore 64 ended, especially since by the time that this could've been released, Commodore would have closed their doors. Why it was never released is unknown, though there is a likely chance that the company that was going to publish the game closed down, and the developers couldn't find another publisher before giving up on the project themselves, and cancelling it entirely before a cracking group got ahold of it, and put it out onto the world for free, which then led to Jazzcat finding it in 2014, and adding it to the Games That Weren't 64 site.