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.
We are excited to learn of yet another Ultimate game which was apparently in the works for the Commodore 64.
Following on from the successful conversion of Nightshade, Shahid Ahmad was offered the chance to convert both Knightlore and Alien 8 for Firebird Software.
Unfortunately though, things went sour with Ultimate after Shahid got himself an agent, and the agent tried to contact the Stampers. The Stampers at this point stopped all contact – something which Shahid has ever since regretted. A huge shame!
What is not known is if the conversion was offered to anyone else after that point, or if it just faded away due to not being able to find someone else up for the job. I guess we may learn in time!
Yet another game at the early stages of trying to find out more. It is believed that the game was to be called Epsilon (see panels in graphics), the game being done back around 1988 time with Andrew Morris.
The game was apparently around 80% complete, but never finished by Tony due to personal circumstances. Sadly it would have been his final game. Luckily Andrew had all his graphics and very kindly passed them onto GTW64 for preservation. Sadly no executable or code was to be found of the game itself.
The game was to be a cross between Defender and Space Taxi, and featured a number of colourful levels – some of which later inspired the Amiga game Kid Chaos. As you can see from the gallery, the game was taking shape very well!
A space ship could be flown in two modes:
Fight – where the ship handled quickly and featured weapons to help you battle oncoming enemies (Defender style)
Land – where the craft took on Moon Lander type qualities enabling you to pick up robots (Space Taxi style).
The game would well have been an interesting mix of two game styles and Andrew felt would have been success if it had been released.
Hopefully some day we will find out more about this game and see if it can be saved. It sounds potentially like a superb title that never was! Check out the graphics for now!
Boom Software had a number of titles advertised in 1984 for the Commodore 64, including this game.
From what we can see, this game seems like it does exist, but is yet to be preserved – being in the C64tapes archive at present and awaiting conversion. Until that time we’ll keep this entry open until the game is preserved.
One of a series of games from A.R.Software which was missing for some time. Peter Weighill has kindly informed us that the game has turned up on Gamebase here:
Dots and Boxes is described by the advert as an intelligent game where the user and computer take turns in completing boxes by drawing a line between two dots. The aim of the game is to win the most boxes whilst skillfully minimising the number of boxes given away to a computer.
A very simple concept, which seemed to please one particular reviewer in Commodore User magazine – where the game was actually reviewed! This suggests that this game exists, but did it get a release?
A very quick and brief entry for a game we know little of at the moment, not even a title just yet.
Charles Deenen in a note back in 1988 mentioned about an “Alien game” that Maniacs of Noise were going to be composing music for. The game was being done for Hewson.
Just to state, it was not Zamzara – as this was listed further down. So what was this other “Alien” game being worked on? Was it Scorpion?
Early days, but we hope to find out asap what this game was exactly!
A very early entry for a game we don’t even know the title for yet.
This was a title mentioned by Geoff Phillips as being in development at Orpheus around 1986 time.
It was farmed out to a set of developers in Colchester – but after 2 months work, there was nothing to show and the company had lost their programmer and had no way to complete it.
There was a very bad meeting with the war game company’s boss to explain that the game could not be delivered, and that was that.
It is likely that nothing will ever be found of the 2 months worth of work, but it would be good to put a name to the game and close the case on this one. Do you know any more?
The unknown Vietnam game was another title which never was from Orpheus Software, and was a wargame that tried to cash in on the many Vietnam films that were around at the time.
It apparently may have come from Tim Holland of Databyte as an idea, but for reasons yet unknown – the game never made it. It was likely never finished or released due to Orpheus going under.
Just how far the game got, we do not know and yet do not know who was coding the game exactly. Geoff was unable to remember who was doing the game.
It is still early days yet, but if you know any more – please get in touch!
Yet another Firebird title to go into the GTW archives, this time a title by Cory Kin. Indeflatable was written for Firebird Software back in 1988 – a few years before their other unreleased title Gem Quest.
The idea behind the game was to control a space ball that could change size by interacting with different enemy aliens – so that you could fit into different sized tunnels or pipes (in a similar concept as in Mario Bros). It was essentially a sci-fi based horizontal scrolling shoot-em-up mixed with some maze game concepts. A level is completed once you find the exit. The game featured some excellent graphics by Toby Eglesfield, music was planned to come later from Matt Gray if the game was picked up.
Once the game was presented in a final state to Firebird, they were paid and asked to change the titles so it could be released on their Silverbird label, but nothing happened to it. The developers thought it was down to the game, but it was actually down to the Silverbird label being dropped, so it didn’t quite manage to squeeze out.
Since then the game had been sitting on Cory’s disks for many years – sadly at the time Cory could not find the game – but after sending his disks to us, we found it! Or at least remains of it at first!
Originally we thought that was it – but then Cory found a last batch of disks which GTW converted in 2017, and found the game in its complete and final state for Silverbird.
Sadly, there was no music included – as things went dead shortly after payment and nothing could be arranged. Cory believes they would have got Matt Gray to do all of the music.
A huge shame overall that this never got a proper release – but we are glad to share it with you thanks to Cory. Here is the full game as an early Christmas present for 2017 thanks to Cory.
Wow, the list of unreleased Codemasters titles for the Commodore 64 continues to grow, and grow it does with the inclusion now of Firehawk.
This time a game again by Finlay Munro which was mentioned recently in a conversation. He mentioned about working on a NES port of a top down 8-way scroller. It was likely to have been his last bit of C64 work (either that or Captain Dynamo 2 which we found).
After a bit of digging around, we found that the game was a conversion of Firehawk (see above). The game was believed to have been completed, but not released due to the market shrinking too much and Codemasters pulling out.
The game was done through Reflective Design, and recently in 2013 – Duncan Kershaw managed to recover a level 1 map from the game. Duncan suggests that he has seen the game up and running, so hopefully we will see more. You can now check out the C64 graphics for yourself as well as download the map which is embedded into the Reflective Designs editor (used for Bubble Dizzy, DJ Puff etc). There is also the note file that came with the graphics which can be ran via SYS 2064 (Thanks Vinny Mainolfi!)
Finlay has said that he will go through his disks at some point, as he never threw anything away. Firehawk should well be coming to GTW64 at some point in the future!
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