WHEN RETRO GAMER'S Martyn Carroll looked at unreleased Spectrum games, one of the entries he made was Ocean's conversion of the TAD Corp coin-op, Toki. As he pointed out, the game should I swung its way on to the Spectrum 128K. At the time, Dave Locker who worked on the game with his son, John, promised he would search through some boxes in his shed to find any possible Speccy assets. Although he says he still hasn't had chance to pop into his shed, he has had a dig around in his loft - and his endeavours have yielded 8 surprising result. “I came across a couple of disks which have 'Toki screens' and 'Tokiproject' written on the labels. They are 3.5 inch Atari ST disks, but I don't have any means of checking what's on them as I don't even have a PC with a floppy drive these days," he said. Within a few days, the discs were in Martyn's hands so that he could work out whether or not they would work via a Spectrum emulator, but he could only find Toki character sprites and no code. But this is where things get exciting: Dave has since confirmed that the sprites are from the Amstrad Plus/GX4000 version of the game. This version, like that for the Spectrum, was canned when the programmers realised the sprites would take up too much memory. The cartridge size Ocean wanted to use for the GX4000 and Plus machines was not big enough so while the first level was finished, there was no space for other levels. "As to the date, I really can't remember exactly when the project was cancelled, but it's quite possible that it dragged on into early 1992," Dave says. DISCOVERY PROSPECTS: There is a chance that the first level of the game will be unearthed from Dave's shed in due course so we can only sit back and wait in hope that this will be the case. With a bit of luck we could have an update on this in the future, but for now, it's great to see a set of character sprites from the game still remain in digital form. 
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