It could have been a separate group that used the name, that maybe had never even heard of Softdisk's Loadstar. The name is a reference to the standard C64 load command, it's possible that someone else came up with it too.
I don't think the theory of another Loadstar is plausible. I couldn't find any evidence for it, and a more likely explanation emerged after investigating this thing a bit.
Lost was supplied to F4CG by their member Maja, a well-known Polish games supplier. There's an indirect link between F4CG and Loadstar, and that's Cherry Software - a Swedish company run by a fellow known as Newsflash, his name was Per. I came across this comment about Cherry Software, made by Fungus:
You know Cherrysoft was in the business of getting games and selling them to Loadstar and other publishers, Cherrysoft was run by Per.
(...)
That kind of thing was going on a lot back then to get firsties. Maja quit the scene because Per didn't pay the coders of some games, and he took unreleased originals with him.
There's a very interesting note released by Cherry Software in 1996, called
"Cherry vs. Scene":
https://csdb.dk/release/?id=160566. In the note, Per confirms that the ranks of F4CG and Cherry Software were closely intertwined. Cherry Software handled their own business (trying to arrange sales), and F4CG would do their own (first-releasing cracks) in this weird relationship typical to the 1990s.
What I think might have happened is that Maja acted as a middleman between Polish game developers and Per, who would promise to sell their games to Loadstar in the USA. That would've seemed like a good option at the time - the commercial C64 market in Poland was dying and piracy was rampant, so any opportunity to make profit off their games in a foreign currency would've been tempting. In some cases, things wouldn't go as planned and those game, prepared by the developers for being released in Loadstar, would end up being "cracked" (by F4CG, of course) instead of being sold (*and* cracked by F4CG, obviously).
To figure out what exactly happened to the games that didn't make their way to Loadstar, it'd probably be necessary to reach out to their authors and ask for a first-hand account. I might do that someday
🙂 But first, I need to gather more information from various sources, I bet there's some relevant insight to be found in disk magazines from the 1990s.
Anyways, thank you guys for your help. I was hoping that those games might've seen the light of the day through some packaged standalone offerings from Softdisk/J&F Pub., and I'm sorry to hear that wasn't the case.
