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.

Latest News and Posts

Zorro In Wonderland

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

Zorro in Wonderland was a game that had a preview sneaked out many moons ago, but nothing was really known about it. Ruben Spaans in 2012 sheds some light on the game:

“This was just a “test game” I wrote because I wanted to try out a graphics engine similar to the old Sierra adventure games, and see how it performed on the C64.

I believe there is a release by Urine or something, there is no newer version of the game than that one, and no plans were made to expand on the game either.”

So that was that!…. purely a test game with no intention of there being more to it!…..

Case closed!

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 2 Comments

Zombies, Undead Or Alive

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

Along with Cyber Cop, Pedersen Systems were due to release this game on the Commodore 64 and advertisements listed it as so.

However, only the PC versions managed to see the light of day and the C64 conversions failed to do so. We got in touch with the game’s producer, and he sadly confirms that the game was only produced on the PC and never ported in the end for the C64.

Just vapourware for this title, so case closed!…

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 7 Comments

Zone Of Darkness

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

A promising game from the once promising Cherry Software. Coded by Taboo, the style of game was to be a cross between Flashback and Impossible Mission.

The intro features a stunning 3D filled vector car driving around with fluid movement (Reminiscent of the Another World intro). Also it featured some haunting music by Shogoon and some nice graphics to match. I still remember being shocked watching the intro when I picked this up on a Binary Zone PD disk.

The game actually came to a halt when the development team went their own ways with other projects. According to the programmer, the game was very close to completion in terms of the engine, all that needed doing was the level graphics and designs.

A huge shame… Nothing was ever seen apart from the intro sequence, but GTW is proud to show you part of what the game was to look like. There are now some screenshots of the game’s main character moving around… and its VERY Flashback like!… Taboo kindly handed over all the game and its sources, but sadly these bits were lost a few years back in a hard drive crash, and are currently being recovered again from Taboo for GTW release.

GTW can finally now confirm that sadly no fully working version of Zone of Darkness is to be available in the near future, but we have been finding bits and pieces over the years. We exclusively released the Character test demo some time back, which allows you to move a very well animated Flashback character around a test screen… This gives an indication of how the game was to roughly play.

The game never really got to a playable state before it was cancelled. Some basic level design work was actually started, and Witold Bryndza found the disk with the artwork on after a 5 year search. See the downloads for an extra graphic disk with the 4 top files being executable and showing the impressive graphical asset work which was intended for the backgrounds. The game would have ran on a stock C64 without any enhancements.

It is hoped that some day we will learn the full story about the game and the intentions for it.

Trivia – Commodore Format once bizarrely claimed that the Zone of Darkness intro was an intro for a SEUCK game on their covermount called Road Course. Not entirely sure what they were smoking that day.

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Ziggurat

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

A strange name for possibly a strange game which was mentioned way back in Zzap issue 32 in their PCW show article.

The game was described as being a forced 3D isometric perspective puzzle game, but thats all we currently know. No other clues as to when the game was to be released.

The game did eventually surface on other platforms such as the Amstrad, and it was found to have been a 3D arcade adventure, and not really a puzzler. It looks pretty much like your typical Head Over Heels clone.

However, no information seems to show what happened to the C64 conversion, but Tigress Designs didn’t seem to last long. C64 conversions of isometric games could prove very troublesome, and Tigress might have had that problem with Ziggurat going across to the C64. Then the company could have also folded before it was too late.

Many possibilities, but no hard facts just yet… maybe you can help with that?

Do you know anything about this game?

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 1 Comment

Zeus

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

A rolling demo of what seems to be a Greek based game.

This slideshow shows various screens of the game and credits, including a piece of the interluding screen from the game.

It’s unknown how the game would play, but it seems as if the game would have been a flick screen adventure game

Graphically average, the graphics are slightly cluttered to make life confusing if you were playing. Just whom you would be controlling is anyone’s guess.

With a full set of credits in place, hopefully it won’t be too hard to find out everything about this game.

More information needed on this one…

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Zero-X

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

Another puzzler, and another game which I can’t make head or tail about. Fair graphics, but sadly I can’t find the playability.

Thanks to contributor Csaba Virag, we learn that the game was created by the Hungarian group Chimera, with code and graphics by Balázs Vilhelm (who also created Zaxon), with music by Chopter.

The music was apparently just placeholder, with final music due to have been created by Griff/Chromance.

It is confirmed that the game was never finished, and a preview (this one) was sent to Mr Wax of Chromance, but just published it under the label of Gulas (a fake label of Chromance).

Balázs confirms that he programmed the game and drew all the graphics, the music was the work of the team’s musician Chopter/Chimera. It never got any further than this.

The coder confirmed to Csaba that he lost his disks when moving home, so there is almost zero chance now of ever finding a more complete version.

Case closed!

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Zen

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Zen was to be the birth of many a SEUCK enhancement for Jon Wells.

Created back in 1988, Zen was a space shooter which Jon created and started to enhance using various tricks and learn about how SEUCK worked as a whole. He crammed many different enhancements into the game which led onto bigger things such as Twin Tigers. Most likely Jon could have tried to sell the game to another publisher like many others did back in the early days of SEUCK.

Unfortunately when asked about the game and digging it out for GTW, Jon mentioned that the game was sadly lost forever as it got corrupted on an old disk. Unless by any remote chance someone had a copy from Jon, this is now lost to time.

So a very quick open and closed case sadly…

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Zaxon

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

As we draw to the end of the games, i’m left with yet another puzzler.

The aim is to turn all the white squares (ON) to yellow squares (OFF). If you click on a selected square (regardless of if it is ON or OFF), all the 4 adjacent squares on each side of it swap states (ON turn to OFF and vice versa).

The square you clicked on remains as it was before the click. Once all squares on the screen are turned off within the set number of moves (given at the bottom), you progress to the next level. If you don’t turn ’em all off before using up all your moves, it’s game over!

Gaz Spence confirms in 2015 that the game was fully released by Chimera designs in 1993 … http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=8854&d=18&h=0

However, the developer Balázs Vilhelm got in touch via the comments to say that the game wasn’t actually fully released or sold. He reveals that he wrote the game in 1993, as a beginner in assembly language. It was planned to be sold through Mr. Wax/Chromance – though he would have been happy for it to be just released on a disk magazine. After a while, communications stopped and then no more was heard about the game and it was never sold.

Balázs is glad that a little slice of his past can still be found online, and that he has left a small memory behind in the C64 world.

Case closed!

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 4 Comments

Zanaton

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

Yet another SEUCK title which has come from the Zzap article which was ran back in 1992 time to search for good Megatape games.

Richard Thompson’s Zanaton was a neat little space shooter, which got Zzap excited because of the excellent explosions in the game. Apparently they were gorgeous, but they were to be the downfall of the game according to Zzap.

Although looking great and not being that bad, the game suffered from the bullets looking almost identical to the explosions. I’m guessing the bullets exploded after some firing, as the screenshots did not suggest anything like this.

The game was actually called Zanaton and not Zanatron like Zzap reported. Richard felt that the game explosions didn’t make much difference to the game and that it had 3 distinct levels.

Only Richard Thompson will know more, and he is the guy to find in the hope of releasing this long lost title. We are hopeful, but did Richard keep any of his old disks? Well, it seems he did … and Richard is now going through his work disks and tapes to try and recover a bunch of his titles.

May not be long until this one is found!

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Zamzara V1

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

Ok ok, yes we know that Zamzara was infact released, but light was shed recently on a rather different game which was shaping up originally by Jukka Tapanimaki. I really love this game, first played on Commodore Format’s powerpack 9… The music, graphics, gameplay is awesome and holds fond memories from my gaming childhood. This would most likely be at least in my top 20 games.

Zamzara was originally going to be very “Impossible Mission” like, with the aim to collect Genes and built DNA. Hewson loved what they were seeing, but thought that the game was way too complex for people to play. As a result, Jukka reprogrammed the game from scratch and it became very adventure like. Hewson took another look at the game and felt that it was now a bit boring.

Following these final comments, Jukka dumbed it right down into a simple shoot-em-up, which Hewson eventually gave the thumbs up to. According to sources, they still said it didn’t have enough content, so Jukka added extra content to create the fantastic game that was eventually released.

But it asks the intriguing question about what happened to these other previews of the game, which played rather differently to the final version. It will be very interesting to see other versions of this game for us to check out. TNT/beyond force from the Lemon forums first brought to light about other versions of Zamzara, and we have quoted most of what he has said about the versions here.

In late December 2015, we added an updated version which now includes music to try and round off and complete the original early version of the game. Worth checking out, and you can now find this version under downloads, thanks to Esa Lyttinen!

He has also put out an earlier version of the game with rather different graphics, which you can download and check out. As you will see from the screenshots, there is a loading screen which Jukka originally did himself which was unused and later re-done by a well known loading screen artist. Recently some of the game’s code has been recovered thanks to a currently unknown preservationist – along with a demo showing a space ship feature which was not used in the game. The various demos added also shows a map feature which was not used in the final game.

It is possible that the game went straight onto the Rack-IT label after the the comment of “Not enough content” from Hewson… which is very sad, as the game is truly awesome, and one sorely missed on the C64DTV.

We are hoping to find more on this title, but sadly Jukka passed away in recent times. We don’t know much more than this, but it is a huge shame that a wonderful talent from the C64’s history has gone. Zamzara being a personal favorite game of mine brings much respect from myself to Jukka, and it is a huge shame that we will not get the chance to hear from him about his work.

We hope that in the future we will be able to host more of his lost/early work as a tribute..

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