Proprietor of Games That Weren't—a digital archive dedicated to unreleased and cancelled video games, founded in 1999. A passionate software preservationist, contributing to various projects, particularly for the Commodore 64. By day, working as a software/web developer.
Recovery work today for the Commodore 64 with a long lost Gremlin Graphics game named ‘Hill 19’ (Later known as Shell Shock). Sadly nothing playable, but plenty of assets recovered. Also – we have recovered lost graphics for the unreleased Piranha game ‘Coven’ Continue reading →
Our next Game Boy Color entry into the archives is a very early multi-directional platform engine, featuring a test Super Mario sprite that you can move around and with parallax background elements. There is hardly any interactions and no enemies, though you can jump around and explore quite a large map. Continue reading →
Paria was very much an Elite-inspired game, developed by Soft Dorothy Software around late 1989 and abandoned in early 1990. What exists today is essentially just a very early prototype – a glimpse of what could have become a sprawling space adventure. Continue reading →
Some more earlier builds of released games for you today, with a few prototypes of Alien Olympics on the Game Boy original. Two are undated, though one of the files is dated 14th June 1994, which seems to be very close to final and likely contains just final bugs not yet fixed. Continue reading →
The amazing Ken Van Mersbergen has done it again, this time with the miraculous preservation of Imagic’s Moonsweeper for the Commodore VIC-20. A conversion missing for 42 years has now been painstakingly restored from printed source code by Ken, with help from Simon Rowe and Torsten Okra. It is also thanks to the game’s programmer Fred Crimi that the code had been safely kept. Continue reading →
Thanks to Dr. Doom / Rad / Ons, a very slightly different version of Children’s Trivia by Cybal Software has been preserved for the Commodore 64. A version of the game already exists in Gamebase64, but this has a few … Continue reading →
Our good friend Bertrand (and regular contributor to GTW) got in touch recently to flag that John Hardie and himself have been archiving some titles on the Atari 8-bit from a publisher called Maximus (obtained via Tim Kilby, who was one of the programmers). Continue reading →
Our next entry into the Games That Weren’t archive is an extremely early and unfinished PC DOS shooter called Duel. The idea of the game would have been to fight against a CPU or second player and duel against each other across a parallax landscape. Continue reading →
Pinball Construction Set was a title that I lost many hours to constructing various pinball tables, and many others did too. Unbeknown to many of us, a Commodore Amiga version was also on the cards way back in 1986 from Electronic Arts. Continue reading →
Pocket Panic is a great homebrew title by Steve Jones that was released in 1999 for the Game Boy Color as part of the Bung Coding competition. It is a neat modern mix of Loder Runner and Panic Planet, and with possible inspirations from other games. Continue reading →
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