Welcome to Games That Weren't!

We are a 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.

Latest News and Posts

Chuck Rock

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: , last updated: by Frank Gasking

Was it or wasn’t it? The question which has been asked for sometime about whether Chuck Rock on the C64 was ever officially released. To be honest, we had assumed it was – but was just a pain in the backside to find.

But with no-one thought to actually owning an original of the game, a bit of digging found that Core was not happy with the quality of the C64 conversion and decided to cancel it rather than release it. This was even though all the adverts had been published and magazines had reviewed the game. Oddly, it scored 96% in Zzap, which was actually well deserved.

Built by Genias for Core, the conversion was pretty solid and faithful to the original – although the game itself wasn’t the best in the world, and slightly overrated – the conversion was as good as it could have been – with some very good graphics, replication of the original rock band title screen and good music/sfx throughout.

I’ll leave describing the game itself to the review which can be found in the gallery, but essentially the game was a platforming game where you could hitch rides on various creatures and throw rocks.

Thanks to the guys at Ready64, it was found that during development of the game – Core decided to cancel the project due to believing that the C64 market was dwindling. Genias wrote to Core and got written agreement to have the game completed and released only within Italy. In an interview with Genias manager/coordinator, Raffaele Valensise (in Italian at present), it is suggested that working with Core was a rocky time – with no real sense of belief that the game was going to be anywhere near as great as the Amiga title.

Although Core never got the title released in the UK and around Europe, they did congratulate the Genias team for doing such a superb job. Sadly many of us were never given the chance to purchase the game, and for years as a result – the game was subject to question of whether it was ever properly released.

In early 2013, Sam64H from Lemon64 came forward with some photos taken of a copy owned by a friend. I’ve added the photos to the entry, and then later a series of higher quality scans. The tape copy was apparently brought via Ebay UK, and the disk version in Ebay Italia over a decade ago now. It is probably the first time many of us have seen an original copy of hte game.

In May 2014, Holger Klipsch very kindly got in touch with GTW64 after recently purchasing the game. He has also extremely kindly posted us a perfect copy of the game and photocopy of the instructions which we have now added here for you to download. It is essentially a clean copy of the game with no crack intros.

Then finally, in 2017 – Aki Sivula created a TAP backup of the tape version (preserved with DC2N4-LC, and TAP image produced with TAPClean) and has kindly allowed us to add it to the archive. The tape image has been fully tested till the game completion.

This means we can finally close the case on this game! Case closed!

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Unnamed Tony Gibbs game

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: , last updated: by Frank Gasking

Slightly scraping the barrel you might say with our next entry, but honestly there is a game behind this and one which we need to get hold of the game’s author to shed some much needed light.

Jason Kelk first highlighted this game and pointed GTW64 in the direction of a Graphical Techniques demo which Tony and Jason did for Commodore Zone issue 06. In the Sprites demonstration area is an example bi-plane sprite which animates and circles with a hi-res overlay. It looks pretty impressive.

What many people don’t know is that the plane was to feature in a game being developed by Tony Gibbs. We got in touch with Tony, and he confirmed that the sprites were for a game being developed that was inspired by the Amiga PD game Skyfight.

Tony felt that there was nothing quite like the game, and decided to make a version of it. There was to be up to 4 players, open borders for larger play area, zooming play area and a choice of 3 planes. The plane in the screenshotis of a “Sopwith Camel”.

Although the sprites were ready and zooming workign, shot impact, damage levels and explosion bits – as well as music and titles were never completed. It seems that Tony got sidetracked with real life, and the game was ultimately shelved – which is a huge shame.

Tony does offer hope that he may be able to recover the game in the future in its final state, so watch this space!

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Beat 1984!

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

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.

 

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All dogs go to heaven

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: , last updated: by Frank Gasking

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!

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Alien 8

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: , last updated: by Frank Gasking

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!

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Epsilon

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

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:

  1. Fight – where the ship handled quickly and featured weapons to help you battle oncoming enemies (Defender style)
  2. 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!

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Logger Mania

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: , last updated: by Frank Gasking

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.

Thanks to Martin/Stadium64, we can confirm that the game was indeed released, and it is in Gamebase64 too under a different publisher. So this is a case closed! :)

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Dots and Boxes

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: , last updated: by Frank Gasking

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:

http://www.gb64.com/game.php?id=15229

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?

Case closed!

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Alien game

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: , last updated: by Frank Gasking

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!

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Unknown war game

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

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?

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