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.
No we’re not mad – but it seems that Elite had planned 3 Thundercats games to be released in 1988. The first in the series was Gargoyle Games’ Thundercats – The Lost Eye of Thundera. The second eventually turned into Beyond The Ice Palace, and which you can read more about here.
Issue 3 of ACE magazine confirmed that there were 3 versions in production – one version being produced in house at Elite (thought to be this 3rd part) and another version which was outsourced (and now known to be Nick and Dave’s game) – thought to be the second game in the series. See scan below.
We do not really know anything about the 3rd game sadly – as Elite were keeping it all very hush hush. However, we believe that the Mark Cooksey tune produced and used in Bombjack 2 was actually intended for the game being done in house. Mark sheds a little bit of light on what he knows.
We now hope to find out more from Steve Wilcox himself and see what he can recall and who was doing the 3rd game. Was it Neil A Bate and Chris Harvey?
Our next entry is brief, though hope we may well get to find out more soon about it. Whilst at Imagine Software, Colin Porch was busy working on an educational game. He can even be seen working on the very game in the background of Commercial Breaks at one stage, looking pretty stressed!
The basis is pretty sketchy, but Colin so far has recalled a toy train which would go round and off screen, then come back on screen from the other side with a set of shapes (or a single shape) on top. No doubt the user would then be required to choose the name of the shape or answer some kind of question. You can just about make out a train shape on the screenshot we extracted from the video.
Thanks to Mark Jones, we now have a higher quality still of the game – which seems to show some kind of kangaroo object on one of the train carriages. All the carriages are multi-coloured.
That is all we currently know at present, but according to Colin the game was actually finished. But just before anything could be sorted to get the game in the shops, the big crash happened for Imagine, and the game was never picked up by anyone else.
Thanks to Anonymous Contributor, we learn that Colin gave an interview with Retro Robbins in 2023, and spoke about the title:
He mentioned (Anonymous contributor suggests that it was a bit hard to hear at times):
“What I was detailed to do was to produce a game for toddlers and this was effectively, I’d call it a game, it would be a game for them, but it was an exercise in getting toddlers to recognise shapes and colours. At the basic levels, they were just simply trying to match a cross with a cross or a circle with a circle or whatever, all on a moving train.
And in the later stages, they were asked to identify not only the shape but the colour of the shape. There would be two of the same shape but with different colours and you had to match the one they were trying to find. But it wasn’t a game as such, but it was an educational toy, application, for very young people, very young children.”
In an interview that we did with Colin many years ago for our old site (and is now housed at C64.com), he had the following to say about the game and what happened to the disks:
“I worked on two projects whilst at Imagine. The first was a general purpose program, designed to make games programming easier. Originally written in a form of BASIC, the idea was to have a central framework to manipulate sprites etc., onto which individual routines could be added according to a games’ requirements. I did complete it, but I don’t believe that it was ever used.
The second project was not a game but a program aimed at providing toddlers around the three-four age group with shape and colour recognition tasks. This was almost completed, but all the source code was on the SAGE development machine, impounded by the bailiffs when the crash came. I have no idea what happened to it after that.”
Sadly it seems that the game has gone forever along with the disks that Colin sadly skipped back in the mid 2000’s (which was the fate befell to Parasol Stars, or at least its remains). Maybe someone kept a copy from Imagine back then, but it looks very unlikely.
Hopefully we’ll find out more about the game soon!
Agrophobia was a text adventure game written by Mark Healey (who did graphics for Sleepwalker and the Fun School series).
The game was created whilst at school, and Mark sold about 3-4 copies to friends. It was likely his very first game sold to other people.
This is all we currently know about the game – and we’re not sure if Mark coded it from scratch or used something like the Graphic Adventure Creator tool.
It is also likely that the game may never be found and preserved, but this entry is created for posterity. If you were one of those 3-4 who brought the game and still have it, please contact us!
To be honest, this entry into GTW64 has been a little overdue. Paint and Create was part of a new “Fun School Special” educational range which was introduced around 1993 time across all the main formats by Europress Software.
Many Fun School games have been released over the years for the C64, and Paint and Create was to be yet another.
Reviewed in Commodore Format 28 (January 1993), it received an excellent score of 91%. The game was only available on cassette and contained 6 sub-parts which would be loaded in separately, including:
Interactive Intro,
Make a Monster
Card Creator,
Art Alive,
Jigsaw
Music Maestro
For years though, no digital copy has existed and no-one has come forward to say that they own a copy. Amiga and PC versions do surface occasionally on Ebay and digital copies for both exist.
Was it just that the game didn’t get to sell too many copies as the C64 began to die out? Or did Europress decide that the C64’s time had come and decided not to release the game? Europress continued to produce the Fun School series for many years afterwards.
We managed to get hold of Mark Healey, and he confirmed that he was the graphic artist behind the C64 version. Chris Walsh (of Murder! fame) did the coding. Sadly none of the 3 people potentially involved have anything of the game any longer.
However, it was always odd that Commodore Format for several months had the game on special offer to its readers after the review. Surely had it never been released, it would not have been advertised for that long? With a final search, this time we found what seemed to be a C64 version on Jasper’s Retro Cavern.
Sure enough, there was a C64 label on the front and a tape! GTW64 quickly purchased the title, and within a few days it arrived. The package has been quickly preserved in full and passed onto Gamebase 64 for posterity. Another game saved and one which you can now download if you wish.
For what it is, its a very polished piece of work and worthy of the 91% rating. Nice to finally put the last missing Fun School title to rest. And overall it confirms that the game was in fact released – just in very limited numbers it seems. As a result, it is thankfully…
It may come as something of a surprise, but it was recently revealed by Michael Ware (of Warhawk fame) that he was originally working on a conversion of Biff back in the day under his Proteus Developments label.
Michael was given the task of converting the Spectrum game to the C64 (or may have just been given the brief to go and produce it) and spent two sleepness days getting something together – before losing interest and the project gathering dust. A young Mark Healy had created all of the graphics for the game (apart from the logo). Later in 1993, Chris Walsh was given the task of converting the Spectrum version for Beyond Belief and the game got released eventually.
It was in recent years though that Michael dug out some disks which reminded him of the development that he did many moons ago. In 2013, Michael backed up the disks that he found with the various bits that he did and managed to recover two previews showing a controllable main character, some collisions and a large map area to navigate around. It’s pretty neat, even in its early incarnation – and in comparison to the completed game – makes great use of the C64’s strength of colour palette. Had Michael completed the game – it could well have been a very strong Dizzy-like game which made use of the C64’s strengths.
What is interesting is the date mark for the latter preview – which is November 1989…. This suggests that Biff was originally developed back then, before the days of Beyond Belief (which we believe was established in 1991 according to the Beyond Belief article in Commodore Force)
It seems that Biff had a similar development path to Bod Squad (which was originally meant to be a Digital Magic game rather than a Zeppelin title). Maybe the Spectrum version was finished in 1989, but never released until Jim Scott picked it up in 1993. Well, Michael has said that the game was developed for a company called Zeit Corp, who were mostly a Spectrum based company. They seem to have connections with the Fun School games and Neverending Story 2 – which both Chris Walsh and Mark Healey were involved in…. the eventual developers of Biff on the C64 in 1993. Hopefully Mark or Chris will shed more light on who Biff was meant for …. was it meant to be for Codies?
Anyway – this is a nice surprise to salvage and preserve, and a nice preview too! Check it out!
Andrew Challis is somewhat a bit of a C64 legend, being the coder of two particular games I grew up with and enjoyed a lot (Into The Eagle’s Nest and Trollie Wallie) and also produced some cool loader systems for Interceptor (including Micro Painter loader game for Players).
His very last C64 release shouldn’t have been Into The Eagle’s Nest, but in fact a game called Satar for the same company Pandora.
We know very little about the game just yet, but it was believed to have been a space shoot’em up with adventure elements to it.
For reasons currently unknown, it was never released – and was shelved. Andrew then moved onto pastures new and no more was seen by Andrew on the C64. Andrew decided to take a break from coding after 5 years or so, and left Interceptor to work for BT. The game then shortly afterwards lost momentum and others moved onto new projects. Apparently the game was previewed at a 1986/87 computer exhibition.
We are hoping to find out more about the game very soon, including if anything of its development ever survived (design docs, early demo builds etc). Sadly Andrew has confirmed that he no longer has anything regarding the game, so we hope to find Robin Chapman to see if by chance he kept anything.
A very quick entry, and probably not one to take too seriously!
This was mentioned by a chap called Duncan Lyons from Stockport back in Issue 20 of Commodore Format. He wrote in to the letters pages saying that he wanted to design his own game called The Ninja Eggs and was after someone to market it.
It was likely just a young lad who was hopeful of getting into game design, and nothing was ever started… but maybe there were some plans for the game drawn up. Did Duncan ever get round to sending off his ideas to any of the publishers at the time?
Well Duncan got in touch with GTW64 in 2014, and confirmed that the game was sadly never produced. But it sounds like a series of sketches and cartoons were produced, which we may get to add to the site some day. It seems it could have been a game, but Duncan didn’t quite have the support to bring it to fruition. Maybe someone can help him?
A recent article on Interceptor Software in Retro Gamer magazine (April 2013) states that there was another version of China Miner that should have been released.
It was the very same game by Ian Gray, but also had the inclusion of speech (like Tales of the Arabian Nights did). Richard Jones had gone to Holland to meet with a young coder who had claimed to have written some speech code for the C64. Impressed with the code, Interceptor put it into China Miner and paid the developer a significant sum.
The game had been out there for approximately 2 months before a cease and desist was made from a company in the US, who said it owned the algorithm. As a result the game was temporarily pulled and replaced with the version we all know well.
But what is significant is the 2 month shelf life of the game, and yet there seems to be no version of it online at present with the speech intact. Maybe you have a rare copy of the game? Let us know if you do and if you can make a dump of the game.
It seems that this is another Chiller V1 sort of game – just a piece of preservation to try and make. Maybe you
Our next GTW entry comes in the form of Honest Joe, a game by Bubble Bus Software and advertised in a Bubble Bus catalogue from around 1985 time. The game was also due for release on the BBC Micro.
The game in the advert was described as follows:
“Honest Joe – The getaway after the bank raid went terribly wrong and in the panic the robbers scattered their money bags. Luckily Honest Joe heard what had happened and set about recovering the money and returning it to the bank. Machine code, 3D graphics including mazes, tunnels, rivers, etc…, etc…, smooth fast action and realistic sounds. Joystick or Keys.”
Sadly the game never surfaced and nothing more was ever heard about the game itself.
It was thought that the game was the very same “Honest Joe” game that was released on the BBC Micro by Beebbug Software, but it is in fact a very different game about trading cars.
At the moment, apart from the vague description – we know little about the game. Was it a flick screen arcade adventure? A simple maze game with a bit of 3D thrown in? We do not know just yet, but hopefully in time will learn more about this game. Was Richard Clark involved?
A very quick entry for now thanks to Robin Gravel for his research work. We learn of a C64 version of this Spectrum and Amstrad game thanks to an inlay which lists C64 loading instructions and also credits for the C64 version of the game.
As mentioned – the game saw release on both the Amstrad and Spectrum back in 1989, and was a neat and simple arcade platformer … though what ever happened to the C64 version?
So far we know very little about what has happened to the game and how far it got (if ever started). The coders listed we have not heard of before – was this to be their first game? Did they get stuck?
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