GST Video stands for two facts in the Videopac world. First of all it is the name of a mystic company. Almost nothing is known about GST Video. A few years ago I found some info about the company, but I don’t have any interesting facts so far. Be sure that I will post a story about GST Video on my website, as soon as I have more information.
Second, GST Video is known for great Videopac games. Super Bee, Norseman and Blobbers were released by Philips back then. But there are also GST games that never hit the shelves. One of them, Interpol, was sold on cartridge in small quantities by Nicolas Sapin a few years ago as Videopac 61 – it was the first Videopac prototype game that had been released on cart by a collector. But there is also Shark Hunter, a great action game that definitely deserves a cart release.
It is unknown why Shark Hunter was not released by Philips back then, as the game seems to be 100 % complete. Maybe it was too cruel for the Videopac game range, that consists mainly of titles that can be played by video gamers of any age. On the other hand, I had contact with the owner of GST Video a few years ago. He cannot recall many details from back then, but he thinks that the game (as well as Interpol and „Jake“) never hit the shelves because it was just too late. The Videopac system was discontinued in 1984 or early 1985 and Philips moved on to the MSX system.
Dutch collector BuckyB found an EPROM of Shark Hunter some years ago and planned to release it on cart for the first time in 2001, but didn’t have enough spare time for this project. One year later, the game could be played on a prototype cartridge at the Austrocon in Vienna. Finally, with the experience that I made with the cartridge release of Flash Point in 2004, I decided to produce a limited run of Shark Hunter too. BuckyB gave his ok, so here we go :-)
A final word regarding the artwork: In 2003 Marc Naninck from the Netherlands discovered that an (expanded) MSX version of the game had actually been released by Electric Software in the mid-80s. He bought a copy of the game, scanned and edited the cover artwork so that we could use it for the Videopac version. We used also big parts of the manual from the MSX game, which makes the Videopac release as authentic as possible in my opinion. I hope you like it too.
Have fun with Shark Hunter on your Videopac computer!