Welcome to Games That Weren't

Games That Weren't is a long-running archive dedicated to cancelled and unreleased video games, prototypes and lost gaming history. Since 1999, we have been preserving rare information, assets and developer stories from across all eras of gaming.

Explore a vast collection of cancelled video game projects, unseen prototypes and behind-the-scenes development history from consoles and computers past and present. Our non-profit work aims to document and preserve titles that were never released to the public, before they are lost forever.

Browse the archive and discover thousands of lost and unreleased games across multiple platforms.

Latest News and Posts

Tricks ‘N’ Treasures

Posted: by Frank Gasking

2000 Psygnosis

Platform: Sony PlayStation

Tricks ‘N’ Treasures was a colourful third-person action/platform game in development at Hammerhead for Psygnosis around 1999-2000. The name seems to have changed slightly depending on where it appeared, with magazine coverage referring to it as TnT: Tricks and Treasures, TNT: Tricks and Treasure, Trick n Treasure and Tricks ‘N’ Treasures.

tricksntreasure

Very little seems to have survived publicly from the game, although it received a reasonable amount of magazine coverage before disappearing. We’ve included a selection of those previews within the gallery below, which between them give us a rough idea of what Hammerhead was creating.

The game was set on the small planet of Dorc, whose inhabitants were searching for a new ruler. Players would compete to collect the scattered pieces of an ancient crown and prove themselves worthy of the throne, while rival heirs attempted to do exactly the same thing. Continue reading →

In: Reviews, Sony PlayStation | Leave a comment

Quake

Posted: by Frank Gasking

2002 Randy Linden

Platform: Nintendo Game Boy Advance

Quake Advance is an impressive proof-of-concept created by veteran programmer Randy Linden, exploring the possibility of bringing id Software’s classic Quake to the humble Game Boy Advance. Randy was certainly no stranger to squeezing first-person shooters onto unlikely hardware, having previously been responsible for the remarkable Super Nintendo conversion of Doom.

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For the Game Boy Advance, he went a step further and created his own engine capable of rendering fully 3D environments and enemies rather than relying on the ray-casting techniques commonly used by other first-person games on the handheld.

The results are extremely impressive for the hardware, with 3D enemies and animation, lighting effects, smooth movement and the ability to travel underwater. Even the pre-rendered weapon graphics react to changing lighting conditions through some clever palette manipulation. Continue reading →

In: Game Boy Advance, Reviews | Tagged: | Leave a comment

Celebrating The Arcade 1971-1999 at PLAY Expo

Posted: by Frank Gasking

A bit late after catching up with work, but had a fantastic weekend up at PLAY Expo Blackpool after last going back in 2015 (!) when I was then running the Games That Weren’t stand. This was a really special occasion, as it marked the launch of Paul Drury’s The Arcade 1971-1999 from Bitmap Books, which he’s been working incredibly hard on with Sam Dyer for the past few years. It’s come out amazingly well! John Szczepaniak, Martyn Carroll and myself had the honour of being asked to contribute too, with me putting together the unreleased arcade games chapter, so Paul invited us along to celebrate with him.

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A huge bonus was Eugene Jarvis, of Defender, Robotron and Smash TV fame amongst many others, coming over to celebrate with Paul. Eugene’s games of course feature heavily in the book, and he also contributed the afterword, so it was amazing to be able to hang out together as a group. I was pretty nervous, and it was slightly surreal having a curry with Eugene and the others, then all jumping in an Uber to Arcade Club afterwards. Eugene was extremely friendly, down to earth and very funny too. A great case of meeting one of your heroes, although I failed badly to impress him while playing his F-14 Tomcat pinball game! :D It was also nice to finally thank Eugene in person for his help with some of my own past research and writing. Continue reading →

In: Arcade, News, Press | Leave a comment

GTW64 September 2026 updates

Posted: by Frank Gasking

Not entirely sure where most of 2026 has gone, but here we are – and about to hit October. Only feels like a few months ago I was preparing the Christmas updates. A slightly larger update this month, as we had a lot of contributions come through, including details of a surprising C64 conversion that likely never got far as part of 3 new entries added to the archive, then we have 12 updated entries, a Scooby and Scrappy Doo prototype added and finally 11 lost titles found. See you all next month!

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3 new entries added

Cadaver, Megahirn, Protector

11 lost/missing titles located

Following on from the 15 Grolier / Mindflight titles last month and thanks to Nicol Walder, 11 more previous lost/missing titles for a few of our pages, and also a few missing from Gamebase have been added to the site.

11 lost/missing C64 titles

Scooby Doo and Scrappy Doo prototype added

Just the other day we also added a Scooby Doo and Scrappy Doo pre-release build.

Scooby Doo and Scrappy Doo Prototype

12 updates added

Defensive, Escape From Colditz, Heroquest Expansion Pack 2, Mindbend, Murder!, Picnic Paranoia, Raid on Romaro , Stack Light Rifle games, Star Force Seven, Transforming Overland Robot, Tronix 2, Vengeance Of Zeno

In: GTW64 news | Leave a comment

11 lost/missing C64 titles located

Posted: by Frank Gasking

A quick round-up of several Commodore 64 findings for September 2026, thanks to Nicol Walder, who has been digging through various disk collections and comparing their contents against missing titles within GTW and other archives.

Among the games located are the missing Orbyte Software titles French, Italian and Spanish, along with Rats & Cats and an incomplete copy of Escape from Alcatraz from our Stack Light Rifle Games searches. Nicol has also located Inferential Anne 1 and Inferential Anne 3, neither of which currently seems to be present within GameBase64 or on our Micrograms page, as well as Mind Prober and Poker Party from our Dynacomp catalogue searches. Continue reading →

In: Commodore 64 (C64), GTW64 news, Preservation | Tagged: | Leave a comment

Atari Jaguar/CD combo unit original CAD drawings found

Posted: , last updated: by Frank Gasking

A slightly different kind of Games That Weren’t entry today, with some newly surfaced development material relating to Atari’s unreleased all-in-one Jaguar and Jaguar CD console.

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John Hardie very kindly got in touch with GTW after going through an old floppy disk that he had obtained from Atari many years ago. To his surprise, the disk contained the original FlexiCAD vector drawings for the proposed Jaguar/CD combination unit.

Atari’s redesigned system was intended to combine the standard Jaguar hardware and Jaguar CD into a single unit, rather than requiring the familiar CD add-on which sits on top of the original console. The combination model never made it to market, although photographs of prototype hardware have surfaced over the years and the system was reportedly shown behind closed doors at E3. Continue reading →

In: Atari Jaguar, Atari Jaguar CD, Prototype | 1 Comment

Scooby Doo and Scrappy Doo (C64) prototype

Posted: by Frank Gasking

A short entry for a Commodore 64 early preview/prototype build of Scooby Doo and Scrappy Doo, which was being produced by Ash and Dave for Hi-Tec Software back in 1991.

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This seems to be a test build of one of the levels which may have been sent to the publisher to show progress back in the day, or to a magazine for preview screenshots. There is currently no sound implemented, no cut scenes and there could be minor differences compared to the final release (especially last minute bugs). If you spot anything majorly different, please let us know and we’ll update the page. Continue reading →

In: Commodore 64 (C64), GTW64 news, Prototype | Tagged: | Leave a comment

MELT

Posted: by Frank Gasking

1997 Virtual Studios

Platforms: PC, Sony PlayStation

MELT was an ambitious Iron Maiden game developed by London’s Virtual Studios during the mid-1990s, with Eddie taking on the role of the game’s villain. Announced alongside Iron Maiden’s Best of the Beast campaign, it promised a fully 3D adventure through time and space, with the player hunting down Eddie’s scattered energy Pods before ultimately facing him in Hyperspace.

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Although the game was heavily promoted and appears to have come surprisingly close to completion, Virtual Studios collapsed in 1997 and MELT was never released. For years, the game was known mainly through screenshots, promotional material and a brief appearance on GamesMaster.

That changed in September 2026, when Games That Weren’t was anonymously supplied with a surviving PC build, the original source code, an updated version of the source with modern fixes, and further development material. Continue reading →

In: PC, Reviews, Sony PlayStation | Tagged: , | Leave a comment

“City by the Lake”

Posted: by Frank Gasking

1981 Western Technologies

Platform: Atari 2600

“City by the Lake” is a very early Atari 2600 demonstration from Western Technologies, created as a technical showcase for what a newly established development team could achieve on Atari’s difficult-to-program console. The surviving material consists of a short looping animation showing a jet flying across a landscape while the reflection of a city shimmers in the water below. There is no player interaction or gameplay, but it provides a fascinating glimpse of early Atari 2600 development.

CityShot

The demo was documented in the 2026 paper No Prototypical Prototypes: Prototypes as the Stone Tools of Game Development by Katie Biittner, Paul Allen Newell and John Aycock, which examines several unusual early development artifacts. The surviving code and imagery were provided by Paul Allen Newell, who was working at Western Technologies during this period. The paper explains that Western Technologies had to reverse engineer the Atari 2600 before it could properly pursue third-party development, with Mark Indictor and Paul involved in the company’s “Breaker” project. John Hall was hired for the project after this demonstration.

Continue reading →

In: Atari 2600 / Atari VCS, Reviews | Tagged: | 1 Comment

Fish!

Posted: , last updated: by Frank Gasking

1988 Magnetic Scrolls / Rainbird

Platforms: Apple II, Macintosh

Fish! was a graphical text adventure from Magnetic Scrolls, released in 1988 across a wide range of formats including the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Amstrad PCW, ZX Spectrum +3, Archimedes and IBM PC. However, there remains some uncertainty surrounding the fate of planned Apple II and Macintosh editions.

The excellent Magnetic Scrolls Memorial lists both versions, but notes that circumstances surrounding the release of Fish! mean there is a possibility that neither version actually made it onto shop shelves. Continue reading →

In: Apple II, Apple Macintosh, Reviews | Tagged: | 7 Comments