Games That Weren't^®

2000 Titus

Platforms: Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Color (?)

With out next entry, we may have two completely separate games here – but for now we present a game that was due for release by Titus on at least the Game Boy Advance, which is only known as F1-X (which might be F1 Xtreme or similar).

All we know was that the game was in development for a few months or so by Ian James, with graphics by Louise Herd – but the game was never finished as far as we know, before Ian and Louise went on to work on an Army Men game for the Game Boy Advance, which also was never released.

Lurking within a graphical showcase folder for Louise, there were a series of F1 related maps and mock-ups, but what seem to not only be for Game Boy Advance (at least for one of the screens), but also Game Boy Color too. All seem to be from the same timeframe as F1-X.

Could these assets be related? See our gallery for the time being, but we hope to find out very soon – but if its a different game, then we’ll need to split up this entry. It’s likely there are quite a few screens here which are not part of the same game and we’ll update over time.

And why might we need to split this entry? Well, we have managed to obtain what seems to be two separate builds of F1-X for the Game Boy Advance, however neither work in any GBA emulator. Both files we think were intended to be ran on a development kit, and this is where we need your help:

The 277KB BIN file should be a basic demo of a car moving around a track, demonstrating sprites and a scrollable map. The car was apparently rendered by Louise using 3D Studio Max, suggesting that the cars could be much bigger than in the mock ups we have. The second file is an ELF development file, which needs conversion to a ROM file.

All we know is that the game is likely to have been developed on a AGB development kit with either a TS1 Target Board (most likely) or a TS2 Target Board. We did try to use a toolkit to convert the ELF file into a final GBA rom file using a code library we found, which created a GBA ROM, but which just gave a blank screen.

Can anyone help get these two files converted and working at all? If you can, please do get in touch and let us know and we’ll update the page. We don’t think there is much of a game to be found, but it would be great to see it running and see if it is indeed the game we found in Louise’s art folder.

We got in touch with Louise in 2026, and they were not sure if the game was called F1-X or Street Racer. It’s suggested that the top down mock-ups are of an initial version of the game, and then Louise and Ian decided to do a 3D isometric version instead to make more appealing. The Paris, Tokyo titles were created in 3D Max and Louise recalls creating the F1 cars in 3D Max to create a more consistent look from different angles. The rest was all pixel art.

It wasn’t clear why there were Manga inspired drivers, but that might be related to a possible earlier title of Street Racer and a slightly different design (there of course was already a Street Racer game, so that is likely why it changed).

If in the meantime anyone knows more about the Titus game, please let us know. We hope to get hold of Ian in the future to learn more too. Also – as a bonus, we found a copy of AGB Map Editor, which was used by Smartdog for creating Game Boy Advance maps and have added it here too.

With thanks to Louise Herd for talking to us about their work on the game.

Downloads

• Preview_F1X
• AGB_Map_Editor

Gallery