|  Introduction | The original name for Gwnn was "Challenger", but because of the Space Shuttle accident on the 28th of January 1986, were the world was shocked by the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger and the death of its seven crew members, the game name would change for ever.
Gwnn was held back for over a year because it was one title that didn't have a name, or the Game With No Name. No one could think of a name for it, and in the end it was actually titled as Game With No Name or GWNN for short as it was labeled. A true story!
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| | Gwnn | | Title: | Gwnn | | Category: | Game/Shoot'em up | | Release Date: | 1987-05 | | Language: | English | | Size: | 16K | | Machine: | PAL Only | | Code Type: | Machine code | | Distribution: | Commercial/TA | | Product Code: | 2C 0184 | | Retail Price: | £1.99 | | Game ending type: | No end (highscore) | | |  | | Released by: | Mastertronic | | Cracked by: | Spitfire Cracking Service (SCS) | | Code by: | Strassen, Patrick | | Notes: | It might have been released with broken sprites for a mistake. Also cracked by Shockway Rider. Also NTSC fixed and spreaded in Mexico as Rescate Espacial. The SCS crack is titled Gwnn+ though it doesn't support any trainer. Novaload serial: N103131. |
Download:
Bad save:
Challenger:
Fixed:
NTSC version (Rescate Espacial):
SCS crack:
Shockway Rider crack:
Unmatching hack:
User Rating: 6.3/10 (15 votes)
User comments: Read comments
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| | Releases | | Name | Released By | Release Date | Distribution | Product Code | Retail Price | Format | Package | Rarity | Notes | Owned |
| Original release | Mastertronic | 1987-05 | Commercial | 2C 0184 | £1.99 | Cassette | | Unspecified | | 9 |
| 1 found. |
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| | Covers | 
Cassette Cover (Front) |
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Cassette Cover (Panel) |
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| | Physical Media | 
Cassette |
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Cassette (Gwynn) |
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Cassette (White) |
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Cassette Package |
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| | The Author's Original Game Story | Patrick Strassen has kindly scanned a copy of his original game information notes he sent to Mastertronic in 1987. Your be astonished how much Mastertronic changed the real story and missed out the F1 key option on the cover!
Please note: The Cheat Mode password has been deleted from page 3 by Patrick Strassen. This is one secret Patrick wishes to keep underground. Not even we know it!
  
The study on paper for the main sprite design can be seen in the notes the author did write for XCellor8.
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| | More Details About Challenger | The 'Challenger' download is a pre-release version of the game (before the name was dropped), with 'proper' enemy sprites and no different font in the lower screen. This version was submitted to Anco, who turned it down.
Compare the upper image (GWNN) with this one (CHALLENGER):
The game was submitted 1986 to Anco, a distributor of Kingsoft. In 1987, Kingsoft published a game for the Commodore Amiga (500/600) with the name Challenger. A space shoot'em up game, with "some" imagination also has resemblances to GWNN.
Commodore Computing International September 1987 features a review of GWNN at page 71, but both the enclosed screenshots clearly show the gameplay of Challenger.
However, there's no need to search in the dark corners to spot some screenshots of Challenger: ironically, the Mastertronic one and only release as Gwnn, breezy features all the screenshots clearly taken from the earlier version Challenger, with no change in the charset of the bottom line and with proper sprites.
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| | Broken Enemies | Where are the enemies gone, during the evolution from Challenger to Gwnn? Are they lost forever, under the wild occupation of that new charset as seen in the finally released version we all know? Let's see what could be happened...
Once the game's program has been run, the very first operation it actually performs, is to copy the graphic assets of the four enemy ships from $1F10-$1F8F into $0200-$027F. That is the graphics to be copied into the displayed character set before every time a new level begins.
Apparently, something must have gone weird, when the release candidate for Gwnn has been presented to be copied in its huge number of tapes: that slice of memory containing those 16 redefined characters, has magically become a space where the same four characters were copied four times! Let's compare that memory area with the fully working Challenger prototype game, see the two screenshots which follow.
 Correct values from $1F10  Bugged values from $1F10
The initial code checks the very first byte related to both the first and second enemy's graphics, and if those values are correct, the data transfer to $0200 has the rights to start. This means that in the official game, this data check fails, and no value is actually moved into the desired location.
So, what's the weird garbage which a player must face and shoot down once the game has been loaded from the commercial tape? That is the bunch of graphics resulting from what the loading has left in memory at $0200 due to the usage of Novaload to rapidly load the game, which basically is this one that follows.
 Garbage left by the Novaload
The additional charset which is used in the lower line during the game, is absolutely no responsible for the vanishng of the lost enemies. Looking at the usage of the charset in the Challenger prototype, those letters are actually repeated in memory, basically occurring in a waste of space. In the final release, the second charset has been differentiated from the upper one with no significative changes in the usage of memory.
Replacing the right $80 long block in $1F10 is fair enough to have a fixed version of Gwnn, now available on this page in the downloads area.
 Gwnn fixed
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| | Undocumented Key | Pressing the F1 key it's possible to change the border's color.
By the way, the instructions report the Strobe On/Off function keys as they're implemented on a C64 (F3/F5), whereas the real keys are obviously F2/F3.
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![[ Large cover ]](/dl/covers/g/gwnn_full_large.jpg){kind=link}