Lethal Moves

Lethal Moves is an unreleased beat-'em-up that was developed by Rob Buckley of Radical Software.

According to an interview with Rob Buckley in issue 83 of Retro Gamer, Lethal Moves was developed in response to US Gold's cancellation of the Amstrad CPC release of Street Fighter II. A member of staff from the magazine Amstrad Action complained that their younger readers kept phoning them to enquire about Street Fighter II, and suggested that Rob should develop his own beat-'em-up, as it was likely to sell relatively well.

The first news of Lethal Moves was in the January 1994 issue of Amstrad Action (#100), which stated that the game was "still in its very early stages of development" and was due to be released in February. An interview with Rob Buckley in the February 1994 issue (#101) revealed that the game would require 128K of memory and be available on disc only, as the data for each fighter required around 25K of memory. Eight fighters were expected to be included. At this stage, the game "[was] still in early development, with only one character jumping and kicking his way around the screen." The game also featured parallax scrolling, but Rob stated that "if this slows the game down it will be dropped for the sake of the gameplay."

A news item in the June 1994 issue (#105) told readers "not [to] expect [Lethal Moves] to be ready until late summer at the earliest." A response in the November 1994 issue (#110) from the editor at the time, Dave Golder, to a letter from a reader, stated that the game was still in development, and "it's just proving to take a bit longer to write than expected."

Finally, a news item in issue 2 of the disc fanzine Better than Life stated that Lethal Moves had "been put on indefinite hold."

In a post to the comp.sys.amstrad.8bit newsgroup in Janaury 2000, Rob wrote:

"Lethal Moves was 80% coded, 20% graphics. Shame really cos this was probably the best bit of z80 coding I've done, which isn't saying much."

The screenshots below were taken from the SmArtPLUS disc. SmArtPLUS is an art package for use on Plus machines only. It is not known if Lethal Moves was intended for release on standard CPC machines as well as Plus machines.