JOE BLOW: An unreleased game about a Monkey.

"Original characters"
(Shows skeletons)

Also the "article" mentions someone named "Tim Wharton" who supposedly created the game as started basic programming at age 4. Find him will be tuff though but if you can find the games exact release date we can find out his age since it mentions he was 18 when he created Joe Blow.

I doubt that.

Sirtech is a totally existant company. They published VIRUS: The Game and Armed and Delirious, which were both released.

Keep up the good work though, glad to see this is already going places.

Ok I found a contact number for sir tech but I doubt it will work since the site I found it on claims the number is really old. I'm not an expert at lost media so I want to message the number to someone who knows what to do. Any suggestions on who to send it to?

Is there anyone else who want to help? I see a lot of lost media be given up on and I don't want this to end up the same lol.

This thread peaked my interest so I did a bit of digging and found some info.

• telstar.co.uk/tes/
  
  
• telstar.hypnosismedia.com/tes/

These are the domains of Telstar Electronic Studios. After looking on web.archive.org I found some cool stuff.



Here's the homepage for Joe Blow, in all of its early internet .gif glory. Going to the game page provides some interesting information, such as there being 6 worlds, each featuring 10 themed levels. Also, it mentions a "downloadable demo" coming soon, which I wasn't able to find so I don't think it was ever released.



 I also found this page, which gives even more information about the game, including its plot in further detail. It also proves the game would've been released on both PC and PS1, and would've costed around £39.99 - £44.99.

"All is not well in Dreamworld. The children are having nightmares that are so frightening that they are afraid to go to sleep. No one seems to be able to help, not even the inhabitants of Fantasy Land. They can see what is going on, but can't decide how to defeat the Nightmare King. The children's dreams have become a place that no one wants to go to.



Then one night, an unlikely hero called Joe Blow drifts off to sleep and becomes embroiled in this struggle between good and evil. In this incredible world magic mummies make life troublesome, and old men with bouncy zimmer frames seem determined to give Joe as much grief as they possibly can. It's lucky then that his special ultra cool breath can be used to stop most things in their tracks, because to restore the Queen of Dreams to her throne in Dreamworld he's going to have to use every means at his disposal."

Doing a bit more digging around the web archives of the Telstar Electronic Studios pages, I found a download index page which includes a 5.4mb .zip file download full of Joe Blow media, however the .zip file was never archived by the web crawler meaning it's not able to be downloaded (which is a shame). I also looked through the alternate hypnosismedia.com subdomain on web.archive.org to see if the .zip file was there but it wasn't. Hopefully there's another alternate domain somewhere that has this file archived.



Here is an album of various Joe Blow media I was able to collect. Also, if you're wondering why the game was cancelled, here is a quote directly from the owner of Abstract Entertainment, Stoo Cambridge:

"We spent a couple of afternoons together discussing the project and it looked like it was going to happen but alas things took a turn for the worse after Telstar suffered financial difficulties which meant we just couldn’t finish Joe Blow. With that we couldn’t get over the hurdle and as a result we were in a bad place and it soon become apparent the bitter truth was I had to close the whole company down."

Another interesting tidbit I found was that the original / full name of the game was "Joe Blow Adventures in Dreamworld", deriving from a previous game they were working on named "DJ Fresh Adventures in Dreamworld".




 DJ Fresh sprite test.




I also briefly got into contact with Stoo Cambridge about my little Joe Blow expedition and he stated thus: