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Keystone Cannonball
A sequel to Keystone Kapers? Well yes, but not at first. After programming Crackpots Dan started creating an unrelated game with train theme due to his love of model railroading. However after Keystone Kapers (programmed by his brother Garry) became a huge hit for Activision, Dan and Garry thought it would be a neat idea to add Officer Kelly and Harry Hooligan to his then in progress game. It was decided that Harry would now become a train bandit and Officer Kelly would have to jump from boxcar to boxcar while avoiding obstacles in order to catch him before he escaped. He called this new game Keystone Cannonball. Now you're probably scratching your head about the name. Perhaps the programmer watched Cannonball Run too many times? As it turns out cannonball is old timey slang for a train and comes from an old folk song that hobos riding the rails used to sing about a mythical train called the Wabash Cannonball that could take the rider anywhere they wanted. It's assumed that the name would have been changed before the game was released as the reference would probably be lost on most people. The 'Keystone Cannonball' consists of 11 screens in total which include 8 box cars, a coal car, a caboose, and an engine. Each of the boxcar sections look the same except for the colors while the caboose and engine have unique graphics. The coal car screen (before the engine) looks similar to the other boxcars but has no ladders and is missing the coal graphics so it looks like Officer Kelly is walking on thin air. The engine is also missing some graphics (its wheels in this case) and oddly shares the same collision detection as the boxcars so Kelly will appear to walk on air and fall into invisible gaps. Unfortunately this prototype is at a very early state. Officer Kelly can run from boxcar to boxcar while making sure to jump the gaps in between. If Officer Kelly falls between the gaps he'll lose a life but the game will not end once he loses his last life. Kelly can also climb down the ladders on the sides of the boxcars but cannot jump into the boxcars themselves. In the finished version the player would have had to climb down these ladders to avoid obstacles overhead. There are no sounds or enemies in this early prototype, but according to Dan the code to implement the enemies was ready. There are also a number of glitches in this prototype including the ability to abuse the fact that all the cars of the train have the same collision detection. This allows the player to go beyond the caboose or engine screens and see some interesting garbled train cars. There are also two game variations but they appear to be exactly the same. Although there isn't much gameplay implemented there are a lot
of nice graphical touches going on in this prototype. The
train is nicely detailed with the wheels bouncing up and down
giving an impression of an actual moving train. There's also a
nice desert background which not only includes the standard
Activision mountains and sunset but four different layers of
parallax scrolling cacti. If those cacti look familiar
it's because Dan reused them when he made the desert level in
the 2600 port of Crossbow. 
So why did work on Keystone Cannonball stop? According to Dan he got pulled off onto other higher priority projects and was never able to get back to finishing the game before the crash happened and Activision pivoted to home computer games. That is until 2024, when Dan not only finished Keystone Cannonball but he expanded the game well beyond what would have been possible back in 1983. This enhanced version was eventually released as Casey's Gold in 2025 through Audacity Games.
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