Welcome to Games That Weren't!

We are an Cancelled & Unreleased Video games archive with prototypes, developer history and assets for many computers and consoles of all ages. A non-profit large archive dedicated to preserving lost games that were never released to the public. Sharing history and stories from the developers, assets and more before it is too late. GTW has been preserving lost video game history online since 1999, and long before that offline.

Please Browse our archive and discover the many entries that we host for many different platforms.

Latest News and Posts

Keith Purkiss C64 Archive

Posted: by Frank Gasking

Keith Purkiss was a regular games creator on the Commodore 64 back in the mid-late 80’s and early 1990s, and also created a few games under the pseudonym of Pakman for titles like Dragon Spirit and Little Puff. During his Probe days, he worked on the likes of Tiger Road, Rygar and Lazer Tag which would be released by U.S. Gold / Go!

Although in touch for a few years now, Keith reached out in 2024 after digging out all of his work disks. These would contain unreleased titles such as 666 – Number of the Beast, Aladdin’s Cave, Apprentice and a completely different version of Wacky Races. The links for these pages go to the individual entries we have set up that talk in more detail about those titles. Continue reading →

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

Insect Kill and Clean All

Posted: , last updated: by Frank Gasking

As part of our Christmas 2024 GTW64 update – our next post isn’t quite unreleased games material, but are a set of yet unpreserved Polish games that were released in 1994 and have been preserved thanks to Marcin ‘Tenchi’ Świętoniewski.

insect large

Insect Kill and Clean All are essentially strange hacks of Mario Bros by AtariSoft, with added music, different titles and sprites – but essentially the same gameplay.

Both were produced for the Polish market, and came with a strange copy protection where you had to attach a black box cartridge to be able to load the tapes (which is ironic considering that the games themselves are pirated). Continue reading →

Posted in: Commodore 64 (C64), GTW64 news, News, Preservation | Tagged: , | Leave a comment

IK+ design and development notes

Posted: , last updated: by Frank Gasking

For the past year, we have been preserving Archer Maclean’s legacy, saving his source code and various design notes. You can see some of our examples here of recent work as we start to take a look at prototypes and unused materials.

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Backflip animations – possibly traced from the film Grease (Thanks Avram for the heads up!)

On the request of Chris Wilkins of Fusion Retro Books, we have preserved many work disks of Archer’s – but have also scanned in a plethora of documents and notes which Archer created as he developed his games. These give a fascinating insight into Archer’s process and attention to detail when developing the game. Continue reading →

Posted in: Commodore 64 (C64), Preservation | Tagged: , , | 6 Comments

Team SAS

Posted: , last updated: by Frank Gasking

2003 Rage Bristol / Dangerous Games Ltd.

Platforms: Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation 2
Also known as: Andy McNab – Team SAS

As you’ll be aware, the games industry is a turbulent one, where projects (and even companies) can often fail and result in cancellations. The team who would be assigned to working on Team SAS were described as amazing, and had not long just come off from completing the award-winning B-17 Flying Fortress – the Mighty 8th and were now about to embark on a new development called Team SAS.

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Working with the team was SAS veteran Andy McNab, who donned a skinsuit and gave the game’s motion capture a realism that no normal actor could match. Level designer Stuart Maine revealed that the game also had a lot of animators and was very much animation driven.

Stuart and the team for instance had to plot spline routes through the levels for all four characters, which took a very long time to get right. The advantage is that it made the characters look incredibly realistic and could do animations that matched to the environment. Continue reading →

Posted in: Microsoft Xbox, Reviews, Sony PlayStation 2 | Tagged: , | 3 Comments

Cult

Posted: , last updated: by Frank Gasking

1997 Argonaut

Platform: PC (the possibly others at a later date)

Not long after working on an unreleased Saturn version of Alien Odyssey (a story for another day), Argonaut’s Martin Piper was assigned to another project which was to showcase the new 3DFX Voodoo 1 graphics card (the first real mainstream graphics accelerator for the PC) and Argonaut’s BRender engine.

SHOToutside

Cult was going to be an open world third person arcade shooter, with even talk of Virtual Reality integration at one point. There wasn’t really a story at this point, it was far too early – though Martin recalls a zombie twist of some kind.

Working with Martin on the game were artists Vanessa Pouillard and Owen Jenkins, who put together a few scenes, including an outside world area in a desert and a Diner with some underground parts as a proof of concept over a few months or so. Martin suggests that someone called Emerson was behind the design/concept. Continue reading →

Posted in: PC, Reviews | Tagged: , | Leave a comment

Games That Weren’t featured in 2025 Zzap!64 annual!

Posted: by Frank Gasking

The 2025 Zzap!64 annual has arrived and looks great! The biggest surprise was the six page Games That Weren’t tribute feature by Ian Osborne, who had created the article that inspired it all. Talking about how some of the titles in his article were expanded upon.

I kept over the years misspelling Ian’s surname, and seems there were more I’d missed from old write ups on the site. Now fixed, and my apologies once more Ian. I can assure there are no more misspellings and I’ve double checked. Thank you so much for the lovely words!

Order your copy at https://fusionretrobooks.com/collections/2025annuals/products/zzap-64-annual-2025

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Posted in: GTW64 news, News | Leave a comment

GTW Highlight No.20: Crytek’s Engalus PC demo located and examined

Posted: by Frank Gasking

GTW Highlight No.20: In October, we located the long lost PC technical demo of Engalus. An early game from Crytek that was cancelled. We did a series of hi-res videos and showcased parts never seen before until now:

https://gamesthatwerent.com/2024/10/engalus/

That concludes our 20 reflective posts at Games That Weren’t. Tomorrow, we will begin the first of our final updates to sign off 2024, starting with a lost prototype PC game.

To look back at all our reflective posts over the past few weeks, please visit: https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/tag/xmas2024/

Posted in: News, PC | Tagged: | Leave a comment

GTW Highlight No.17: Recovery of Monster Muncher (VIC-20)

Posted: by Frank Gasking

GTW Highlight No.17: In September, we recovered and saved Matthew Smith’s long lost Commodore VIC-20 game Monster Muncher (missing 41 years). It was miraculously spotted in the Retro Computer Museum and was quite a recovery:

https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/2024/09/monster-muncher/

A fixed version was then later done by Andy Hewitt, making the game fully playable as intended: https://hewco.itch.io/monster-muncher

Posted in: Commodore VIC-20, News | Tagged: | Leave a comment