The 16-bit Conversions?
Whatever Happened To...
Amiga and Atari ST versions of Wec were advertised but never released. The conversion was in development at Ocean France which had previously handled the 16-bit versions of Operation Wolf. “Wec Le Mans was a very challenging project,” reveals former Ocean France programmer Christophe Gomez.
“We only spent a month or two assessing the project. For this one we received the arcade machine but no assets or source code. The project was technically challenging considering the limited 3D capacities of both the Amiga and the ST, and the high quality expectations. But we were ready to tackle it.”
So what went wrong? “It was a long time ago but I believe that there were some issues with the rights and they were not completely secured by Ocean. So our team was assigned to another project, Ivanhoe. I guess that when the rights were secured our studio was fully booked. I also believe that because of the complexity of the conversion the development costs were deemed too high.”
Ocean’s Gary Bracey confirmed in 1991 that the 16-bit versions had been canned. It appears that no actual coding work was done, but artist Philippe Dessoly did start ripping graphics from the arcade board. These graphics surfaced online in 2007 and they’re all that remains of the conversion.