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WEC Le Mans

WEC Le Mans (arcade shot)

WEC Le Mans was one of the many unreleased games from Ocean France. They had a habit of starting work on games before they gained permission from the coin-op manufacturers, and several of their games were complete but never released.

According to one contact at Ocean UK, they used the Batman racing engine with some mockup graphics to test out what WEC Le Mans might look like, but it's unclear whether they were using these graphics from Ocean France or not.

Thanks to Dlfrsilver for supplying these files!

Unreleased Graphics

a1.png a2.png a3.png ab1ab2.png acc.png accident.png alphabet.png am.png animwec.png arrrem.png barre.png basarr3.png degraci.png perwec.png petitobl.png petitoj.png petitoro.png presw1.png presw2.png tablsco.png textedep.png wbokdac.png

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  • Gravatar for TuRRIcaNEd

    This one's a bit of a curiosity...

    Ocean *definitely* had the rights to this arcade conversion, as they published all of the 8-bit conversions of this game; the results of which were - as usual - somewhat of a mixed bag (the CPC conversion was the best by some margin, and apparently went on to form the basis of the pretty impressive original game "Burnin' Rubber").

    The 8-bit conversions were released in 1988, so if your contact is correct and Ocean France were using the "Batman The Movie" routines as a prototype for the ST* and Amiga, that would have been some time later on ("Batman" being a late 1989 release).

    I'm not sure what stopped this conversion in its tracks, so all I can do is speculate - my best guesses are :

    1) Ocean's conversion rights were time-limited and lapsed before the project was likely to have been completed.

    2) Ocean France tended to have much higher standards than Ocean UK when it came to the fidelity of arcade conversions, and the prototype demonstrated that they couldn't do justice to a 16-bit conversion (where the expectations were significantly higher than their 8-bit brethren).

    3) The 8-bit conversions did not sell well enough to justify the spending on the ST and Amiga conversions.

    Personally, I'm inclined to lean towards the third theory.

    * - The ST system fonts are all over some of those rips, so I'm fairly certain we're looking at ST rips there...

    TuRRIcaNEd 10/04/2020 3:24am (4 years ago)

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