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.
Shuttle is potentially a game that never really got off the ground unfortunately. A game by Steve Davis around 1987 time, this was first mentioned in a demo of the same name by Steve that was released on Compunet, and mentioned that Shuttle was a game to be coming soon.
In the scrolltext of the demo, Steve details what the game was going to be like:
“Ok, now let me explain what the game (if it ever gets finished) is all about. You are in control of a USA Space Shuttle and your mission is to destroy a gigantic space ship made up of never ending large plates of metal. It’s meant to be a fast shoot-em suicidal game. It is a 360 smooth scroll.
There are never ending fleets of ships which are constantly patroling the ship and will attack you. The graphics are like that of the game Uridium (Oh no you all say!). Well its going to be better and colourful. You must give credit to these machine code programmers because its flipping hard! Are you all bored yet?”
The demo released was Steve’s first demo and there is no evidence that he did any more code (His handle was Jellybean on Compunet). It is very likely that the game never really got started or progressed past this demo. But it is a piece of history to preserve non-the-less.
Hopefully some day, Steve will spot this page and will get in touch to shed some light. Maybe surprise us all with a preview of the game?
Ball is a neat preview which was uncovered in 2013 by Joachim Wijnhoven on some of Charles Deenen’s disks.
The game itself is at a fairly advanced stage where you control a bouncing ball (similar to Head The Ball) which can fire bubble like shots. However there is no collisions for enemies at present, but you can fall off the platforms to your death. In total, two previews have been uncovered which demonstrate two levels it seems.
Presentation wise, the game comes with some great logos and hi-score table presentation and a series of (mostly non-functional) options. The game was really looking polished overall.
There is no music or sound effects at this stage, but credits suggest that Maniacs of Noise (and probably Charles) were due to compose the music and SFX for the game. It is likely that the disk came from Dream Systems and was supplied to Charles Deenen so that there was a reference point to compose music. There is currently no music in HVSC which fits the description of the game, so we do not know if the sound was ever started.
So what happened exactly to the game itself? It has only surfaced thanks to Joachim going through Charles’ disks it seems. Can Bent Davidsen or Dennis Hansen shed any light for us?
Early days until we learn more, but for now – check out the two previews (first two files on the disk – there are some bonus demos there too)!
According to Commodore Computing International in December 1988, Active Distribution LTD had made a marketing deal with French company Coktel Vision. The first game to be released was Jungle Book.
Peter Pan was to be a future release and was to be a point and click adventure game. Sadly it was never to be, even though the game was released on the Amiga, ST and Amstrad. Here is the Amiga version: http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php?id=2661
It is still early days, but Coktel Vision was predominantly an Amstrad CPC and Amiga based company and seemingly only released the one C64 game in total. The mentioned “Emanuelle” was actually released on the C64 under a different publishing label.
According to Commodore Computing International in December 1988, Active Distribution LTD had made a marketing deal with French company Coktel Vision. The first game to be released was Jungle Book.
Sadly Terrific Land was never to be, and it seems didn’t get a release on other systems either.
It is still early days for us researching, but Coktel Vision was predominantly an Amstrad CPC and Amiga based company and seemingly only released the one C64 game in total. The mentioned “Emanuelle” was actually released on the C64 under a different publishing label.
According to Commodore Computing International in December 1988, Active Distribution LTD had made a marketing deal with French company Coktel Vision. The first game to be released was Jungle Book.
It is still early days, but Coktel Vision was predominantly an Amstrad CPC and Amiga based company and seemingly only released the one C64 game in total. The mentioned “Emanuelle” was actually released on the C64 under a different publishing label.
According to Commodore Computing International in December 1988, Active Distribution LTD had made a marketing deal with French company Coktel Vision. The first game to be released was Jungle Book.
The game was to be an adventure game for children. Sadly it was never to be, even though the game was released on the Amiga, ST and Amstrad CPC. Here it is on the Amiga: http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php?id=613
It is still early days, but Coktel Vision was predominantly an Amstrad CPC, ST and Amiga based company and seemingly only released the one C64 game in total. The mentioned “Emanuelle” was actually released on the C64 under a different publishing label.
A very small entry for now regarding a Pacman game that was in development as a home production by a Philip Asher from Bourne, Lincs.
Philip had madea start on a pacman style game but hit a problem – so he wrote into Tommy’s Tips in the September 1988 issue of Commodore User. He was having throuble for collision checking on the pills and dots.
It was likely that the game was just done for fun, but maybe it started to shape up and become something quite cool? Quite often we see developers who never properly released stuff, eventually surface their old content and surprise us with some pretty fun games.
Maybe this one is the same?… Only time will tell if we ever get to find it…
This was to be a conversion of the Irem arcade back around 1988 time by FIL/Sales Curve.
Commodore User, September 1988 issue mentioned that French software company FIL had got the licence. UK representatives of FIL were The Sales Curve who were to do the conversion.
It seems that FIL lost funding, and Sales Curve possibly decided against converting it and sticking to a small selection of games.
The War Of The Dragon was to be an Hungarian developed game back in 1989, which was based on a book written by Miklós Tihor and Zsolt Mazán.
The book was published in 1989 by LSI and the guys wanted to create an adventure game out of it using the text and illustrations from the book, with more material added in. It was not decided who would publish the game, it could possibly have been self published or published by LSI.
It made perfect sense to have made a game on the C64 at the time, and the platform was very popular at the time in Hungary. With the market however getting too small and then having to arrange for additional text and translations to get sorted for outside of Hungary – it was starting to cost a little too much in the mind to get the game past a prototyping stage.
The developers moved onto other commercial games and applications on the Amiga and PC and the prototype was then laid to rest. We hope to hear Miklós’ story on the game soon, but check out the Creator Speaks section from István, who we think was to be one of the coders.
István sadly confirmed that he no longer has any development disks, so maybe Miklós could still have something of the abandoned prototype for posterity. We shall see!
Up In The Air was to be a game similiar to Sub Hunter by the same coder Richard Bayliss, with graphics and game concept by Wayne Womersley. Think Sub Hunter in a different direction and in the air with a plane as the main sprite. Development was started in February 2009 by the group and got off to the positive start.
The game originally started as a shoot em up concept in the sideways Shoot Em Up Construction Kit by Wayne. The concept showed a toy aeroplane which has to blast different types of enemies on each level and then fly over baloons to burst a particular amount per level. The balloon part was inspired by Kikstart on the C16.
Richard picked up the game and got to work moving the concept outside of SEUCK and into a game coded from scratch. The idea would switch to a different direction of scrolling and feature end of level baddies and bonuses.
Development got fairly far over the space of just over 3 years, with a large number of levels completed, each with an end of level bad guy. Unfortunately as things progressed, inspiration for completing the game became difficult and trying to fix some of the issues with the game.
Too many graphics to cram in, less room to try and improve some of the game play issues – all of this coupled with general demotivation to complete the game meant that in May 2013, the game was officially cancelled. Richard is planning to move onto other projects for Psytronik. Unfortunately sometimes it does just happen for some games – that the developer can lose interest and motivation and decide to move on. Sometimes its for the best, and Richard has certainly done this a few times as you can see from the archive (and unsurprisingly given the sheer output that Richard has on the C64 scene).
Richard has now decided to release all of the workdisks from the game, as well as last build of the game with approximately 9 levels for you to check out for yourself.
We have also added Richard’s own words on the game and also PDF’d all of the diary pages from the TND website for posterity. Check it out!
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