Preserving Cancelled & Unreleased Video Game History Since 1999
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.
An almost never-ending tech demo it seems when describing our next entry. Impulse is another sideways scrolling shooter, has titles in place and a main ship that you can shoot enemies with. However, the attackwaves are endless, as is the repeating background – but it is a promising start to a title which would have been well suited to a budget label of the time.
Of course – nothing ever surfaced. Russel Greenfield never did anything else it seems apart from a hack of Pacmania called Ninja Pac Man. I. Henderson isn’t credited to any other games either.
But James McNiven we have found used to work with Russ Michaels as part of the Delta Force group, and was known as Chopper. Russ sadly is no longer in touch, and we are yet to track James down to find out more. It seems that Russel was known to Russ Michaels, as the Ninja Pac Man is credited 1991 Electric Boys Software.
So what happened to this title? Maybe Russ Michaels can fill in the details…
The original Knight n Grail was a fantastic title which blew many people away when it turned up. One of my favourite games of recent times with some excellent twists and turns.
When this sequel preview turned up, I of course was very excited – but then Mikael was uploading it as an abandoned project which was apparently started several years ago. It’s a huge shame of course!
The title seems like it would have had a completely different spin compared to the first game, where this time you just control a flying bird shooting through various levels and taking different paths. Sort of like Agony on the Amiga if you want something to compare it to.
The preview has a few levels which you can go through and plenty of enemies to shoot. It’s very playable at this stage and shows a lot of promise. Mikael has very kindly made the source code available, which you can also find a copy here. Maybe Mikael will change his mind and finish the game some day, or someone else will pick things up.
A very interesting title which has been sitting in the digital archives for some time.
Sir Lancelot is a scrolling platform and ladders title, sort of like an ancient Green Beret style game. It only has the one level, no sound and is pretty glitchy – but still looks fairly promising for a game of its age. We believe that the game was probably produced around 1986-87 time, as it has that feel to it.
Paul Thomas Ralphs only did one other game, which was the conversion of Match Day for Ocean under the development team name of “Mercury Microware”. Maybe this game was being touted to Ocean at the time?
Andrew Marland we could find no trace of any other work – this may have been his only work on the C64.
So we have some developer names, and are now chasing leads via the Mercury Microware link to see if this helps find any more information out on this game.
A game flagged as being intended for Firebird, but very unlikely that it was intended for release by them – but was possibly sent to them by Michael Holm for approval, and subsequently rejected. Well, Michael confirms that he doesn’t recall sending the game off, so we have taken out the Firebird reference.
The game is pretty glitchy, but is a split screen 1/2 player sideways scrolling shooter. The map is a little too tight to make for a fun game overall. There are a few levels packed in, including a sort of mini-uridium level on level 2.
Overall, the title was (in Michael’s own words) a “proof of concept” kind of game before he created his game Timezone. As a result, the game never got beyond the demo that you see here.
So this is it – Space Ace in its final state, and an exercise in programming for the coder!
A very cool Ghost n Goblins clone which has some nice graphics and a lot of promise at this very early stage. There is no sound in the game, but the rest of it seems to be coming together really well.
If the intro plays up, soft reset and SYS5215 to kick the game into action.
In this particular preview, there are about 4-5 levels in total – before it gets stuck after a crocodile bad guy. However, there is enough here to see that this could have been a nice budget release had it been finished.
So what happened exactly to the game, who was behind it and who was it for? Well, this was a mystery for some years until developer Tim Forsyth came forward in December 2021.
He developed the game when about 15/16 and started making his own game engine in the summer of 1988, with his brother Nic handling graphics, with a friend of a friend creating the animations.
Although things progressed very well, but it was felt too much time was spent on the technology and not the gameplay. Once summer was over, most of Tim’s free time was taken up with an apprenticeship and he eventually brought an Amiga and moved on.
Sadly as a result, the game was never completed and the preview you have here is essentially as far as it got. Tim does suggest that some music was written for the game, along with prototypes of end of level bosses. It is hoped these can be recovered some day to be released alongside the preview.
At present for this title, we are merely going by a game title which was name dropped in a demo called Funitrax Banzai by Henrik Buus Jensen.
In the greetings page, Henrik greets those who are working on the game Trazers, as he was composing the music for it. Sadly there is nothing in HVSC under Henrik’s directory, so we know very little about this game.
Was it ever started? What sort of game was it?
Well, we managed to get hold of Henrik Buus Jensen, who tells GTW64 that his friend Henning Andersen (coder) and big brother, Claus Buus Jensen (graphics) were involved in developing the game. He suggested that Lars Balker Rasmussen may have been involved, but Lars confirms that he wasn’t.
Henning got in touch in 2016 and described the game as a bit like Ocean’s Parallax, with multi-scrolling. It would have had a large play area that you could fly around. Unfortunately the game play elements could not be recalled.
Sadly it was confirmed that he no longer had anything of the game, so its likely this one could be lost for good.
If you look at the games released for the Commodore 64, you’ll notice that we got a conversion of the BBC Micro classic, Repton… or actually, Repton 3 to be precise.
You see, the first two games never actually got a conversion on the C64 for reasons currently unknown, though a recent mini-interview with Richard Kay suggested that he had done a conversion of the first game which didn’t get a release by Superior Software.
Now Richard did the conversion of the 3rd game that was released, so the speculation could be that Richard had done an earlier edition/conversion which wasn’t quite up to scratch. The 3rd game could have been a complete rewrite that was good enough.
Still very much early days and we are hoping to get hold of Richard to get his side of the story and possibly see if anything ever survived of the conversion.
Star of Africa is a game which was being produced back in 1994 by Mindeye.
It is a game which is apparently based on a famous Finnish board game “Afrikan Tähti” from 1951. It was later translated to German and many other languages. Another version of the game exists elsewhere on the C64.
We don’t know too much yet about how it was found, but the game has been painstakingly translated from German and sorted out by GTW’s Jazzcat, 6R6/Nostalgia, B.A/Onslaught and Count Hadik/Depredators. Overall this has been a production done over a very long time.
The game looks impressive and comes with some cool music. Very soon we hope to learn more about it and share more of a story about the game.
But for now, this is yet another game saved from obscurity which you can now check out. We assume it would have been a commercial release had it been finished.
A bit of a surprise, but whilst flicking through issue 7 of ACE magazine, we found a write up on Maelstrom games, where the 16-bit title Grimblood was mentioned.
When discussing about if the 8-bits were being abandoned, they were clear that they were not and gave an example of Grimblood having to lose frames of animation on the C64 to be squeezed into memory.
Therefore we have a clear indication that a Grimblood conversion for the C64 was under way – possibly well under way!
The final game didn’t get a release until 1990 by Virgin, so possibly by that stage they had decided to ditch the C64 market. Andy Elkerton confirmed that the game was being looked at for the C64, but it was decided that the restrictions of the machine were just too much to do a competent enough version.
Was the conversion ever actually started then? This part is unclear, so we may still need to do some more digging to find out who may have been on this project or if it was decided early on before a byte of code was even written.
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