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.
Commodore User magazine ran a pretty interesting game advert back in 1984 for a title called “Beat 1984!”, which was described as a four part adventure game for the C64 with graphics and sound.
The short story line was as follows:
“Your modem has connected you to big mum’s computer – beat her, ‘Beat 1984!’ A four part adventure game for the Commodore 64. Graphics and Sound. Travel; Get Rich; Stay Rich”
The idea was that you’d pay a £18 subscription to the 4 parts. If you solve part one by March time, you’d send your tape/disk and would get part two sent back in return. The game completely ended on the 31st December 1984. Parts would not be sold separately.
I have to say, its the most strangest sale concept for a game that i’ve seen, and no doubt it probably didn’t do very well. Handing over £18 was a lot of money for something you didn’t get to see until you recieved the game, and only getting one part at a time drip fed on completion of the previous seemed a little odd too.
When you sent the game back, was part-one deleted for part-two to take its place? How did that work? Overall, this could be a tricky one to recover – especially with all its parts. Were all of them completed, or was just one part ever made before the concept was dropped?
Did you send off for this game? And did you ever get anything back? Not much else is known just yet, but watch this space.
A very quick entry for a game which is essentially confirmed as vapourware, but was actually being planned for a C64 release back in 1990.
Empire were busy negotiating for the rights to a number of Don Bluth games, including Dragons Lair 2, Space Ace and also All Dogs Go To Heaven.
Although ST and Amiga conversions were agreed and eventually released, it was decided that the C64 market was not suitable for the game, considering they felt that the game would take up 6 disk sides. Ian Higgins at the time , who was negotiating the deal, suggested if there was any interest in doing a cut down version instead. There was no response on this, and so the development was canned before it could really be started.
Or was it started? There is currently no evidence that the game was in development or not started at all, so it remains open to see if there was any concept work done. The game itself was a set of mini games all strung together, and it wasn’t too well recieved at the time – so possibly we didn’t miss much. But of course we are still curious as to what happened and to see something of it.
Well, in October 2013 – contributor Romppainen spotted an ebay auction selling a selection of Vidpro cards. These were cards that used to be on display in the likes of Toys R Us in the USA, where you took the card and went up to the pay register to get your game. In the auction there was a All Dogs Go To Heaven card with a clear Commodore label on it. Was this really a C64 version being sold, or merely a mistake? We’ve added the scan regardless.
Hopefully we’ll get confirmation soon of just how far it got!
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.
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