April Fools' Day is the one day of the year when you have to take every news story with a pinch of salt, and the announcement that Argonaut Games had found an early C64 demo of Croc certainly set our alarm bells ringing.
While this is a pretty obvious and amusing prank ("Adventure Preservation & Restoration Interactive Library Foundation Of Obscure Lost Software" - really, Argonaut?), the cool thing about it is that Croc C64 actually exists—and you can play it for free right now.
Described as "the newly-rediscovered Croc Legend of the Gobbos graphical text adventure which served as the inspiration for the 1997 classic 3D platformer", the game is available for download on Argonaut's site.
"You can use an online C64 emulator like ty64, C64 Online Emulator or Virtual Consoles to play it," says Argonaut. "Simply drag C64Croc.D64 into the box that says 'DROP YOUR C64 FILE HERE TO LOAD AND PLAY'. The game will then automatically load and start. Alternatively, you can download a C64 emulator like hoxs64 (for Windows) to load and play it."
Croc's remaster for modern-day systems launches tomorrow.