Preserving Cancelled, Unreleased and Lost Video Game History Since 1999
Total results: 5
There is something especially appealing about smaller cancelled games. Not the giant, headline-friendly projects that get brought up every few years whenever somebody wants to lament what might have been, but the stranger, slightly more modest ideas that never quite made it through. The sort of games that were clearly far enough along to exist properly and yet still ended up slipping quietly sideways into prototype history. Continue reading
CatGun: Victory Mission G was a manga-style shoot-em’-up game developed around 1995-1996 by the game developer duo PixelHazard (consisting of programmer Arjen Wagenaar and artist Luc S. Verhulst, who both formerly worked for the game company The Vision Factory/SPC Vision specializing in games for the Philips CD-i). The music was composed by the musician duo E * Que/Logic Audio Music Production as they were known at the time (Hans Ouwejan and Felix Faassen). Continue reading
Some news about some fascinating work around a very early and largely lost Japanese home computer game called Dojin from 1980. Sitting between Manbiki Shounen (1979) and Nostromo (1981), Dojin is something of a missing link between early stealth and horror game design. Although the game was completed and shown at a festival at the time, it was never widely released and no original code is known to have survived. Continue reading
Our next set of prototypes into the Games That Weren’t archive are a special set of IK+ prototypes for the Atari ST (and a possible one for the Amiga too), and graphical assets showing early differences and features not in the final game.
There are two prototype builds for the Atari ST, both of which contain what seems to be a blood dripping effect at the start which didn’t make the final cut from what we can see. One build seems to be quite a bit earlier, and features no music and hasn’t had fine tuning for the gameplay. You start with a red belt, even though you are on white belt – and the bonus games play after 1 fight. Continue reading
Ragnov is one of those early Amiga curiosities that gives a fascinating glimpse into the early days of a development team that would go on to produce other well known titles. Created by Softeyes, a Dutch team formed around 1987, Ragnov was their very first game project and an ambitious one at that.
At the time, Softeyes was made up of Reinier “Rhino” van Vliet and Pieter “TUG” Opdam on coding duties, Ramon Braumuller handling music, and Metin Seven contributing graphics and design. All members had roots in the demo scene, having moved over from the Commodore 64 to the Amiga. Continue reading
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