Preserving Cancelled & Unreleased Video Game History Since 1999
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.
Very early days for this one, but in an up and coming interview with Larry DeMar, Paul Drury kindly passed on confirmation that Larry DeMar after leaving Williams started a C64 conversion of Wheel of Fortune.
We know little more just now, but according to Larry – it didn’t get far and there are no screens to sadly share at present.
One thing is that it is not the same game as the 1987 Sharedata title that was released.
Do you know more about this conversion?…
It was 1993 and around the time that Jon Wells was doing Easy Lives for Commodore Force. Jon also had a nice little platform game being produced with some fantastic bitmapped graphics by Michael Smith.
The game was ‘The Adventures Of Weebles – The Mysterious Isle’, a obscure little game with no real mention anywhere, especially within Jon’s diary pages in Commodore Force. Where did we first hear about this game?…. Through Easy Lives.
A few instalments of the popular cheat program included details in the scrolling message about a new up and coming game. The main character, Weebles, was present on the main screen. If you remember the later version of Easy Lives which Jon revamped, there was a little boy sprite who ran across the screen many times. This was in fact the main character himself, making a very rare appearance, which would turn out to be his only appearance.
Thanks to Richard Bayliss, this sprite has been ripped out and put into a small special demo for GTW… just to show the main character. We’ve also put a download in for the game’s music which was composed by Feekzoid.
The game was started by Jon Wells and Michael Smith in 1990 as a pet project. It was to be a Dizzy style game in a single load with around 40 screens. The early version had a smaller character based set of screens, but the guys decided to go one bigger and use bitmap graphics and turn it into a 4 level load (Similar to Crystal Kingdom Dizzy I guess). All the maps were drawn up, but only one of the levels was completed (The Forest) which had around 30 screens.
The game had quite a “Dizzy” feel to it, and certainly Michael Smith’s graphics were outstanding. They were so outstanding that Codemasters (Who Michael was working for at the time) stood up and noticed, and talk was of having the game completed for them and releasing. This could be another of the 20 lost Codemaster titles therefore.
Richard Frost once got in touch with GTW and told us that he received a demo from Jon (After swapping a lot of letters over the years). The game had brilliant sound effects and was a flip screen game where you ran left and right. But you could also go up and down through ‘jittys’. The demo was very impressive.
It seems the interest in the game died down, and Michael went off to University. The C64 began to die out, and the game was put on hold when Visualize was started up. As support for Visualize was poor, and Jon had too many projects on the go at once, he culled things down by cancelling the project. Now Jon confirms that the game will never be completed, and has been added to the scrap list.
Jon though tells GTW that he does plan to reuse some of the graphics that were done for the game. We have been given permission to give out screenshots, but a demo could follow in the future. On the shots page you will find some exclusive screenshots of the game in action, including a very early development shot of the game which was with the character based graphics.
Could we see a cut down version of this game in the future? We certainly hope so… It looks great!
A sad tale for this unfinished RPG game.
This was in development by Waveform in the 90’s, but sadly the game’s creator John Kaiser died in April 23, 1997 due to Hodgekin’s Lymphoma. John left behind this very title which was released into the world by XmikeX. XmikeX was a friend of Waveform and released the remains on August 28, 1997, through disC=overy magazine. It was embedded within the magazine text as a UUEncoded sfx file. Jon Mines recently confirmed that the game was to be published under the Stallion Software label had John finished it.
According to rumours, all of John’s source disks and hardware were given to another C64 scener, which may be Roy Batty.. though there is news of Ernest Stokes having some disks and hardware. This was brought up due to the possibility of someone finishing what is excellent work by John.
It is sad to put a game into GTW for these reasons, but it would be wrong not to, and one thing left to do for John’s title is to immortalise it and preserve what it was.
It is a nice little RPG, and thanks to TRIAD recently cracking the game, they have put the instructions into a note file at the beginning of the demo.The basic controls are : ‘ { and / on the PC keyboard to move the little man around the world.
It seems that the game didn’t reach a large stage of completion, as there is not too much on the disks, but it depends on how big John was planning this game to be. Hopefully friends of John will be able to shed some more light on his title, and we’ll be able to read the doc file which is with the download.
A lot more work needed to fully preserve this game in GTW, but for now this is a masterful piece of work to check out and hopefully John will be pleased that people can enjoy what he managed to create.
Jon Mines suggests that there is a second preview which includes the titles screen, company screen and an intro screen, which we hope to add to the main download very soon!
A friend of John, Staci has very kindly passed on some notes which John wrote on the game to use for its development. The scans you can find below.
A sad tale to a GTW…
Warspite is a cool Shoot ’em up game, bit like Delta which was written by Phillip Ruston. The game was never commercially released for reasons unknown, though its quite a nice little shooter.
Phil recently got in touch with GTW, and it was found that the game was touted to all the usual companies such as Codemasters, Firebird, Players, Rack’It etc, in the hope of getting
it published but he didn’t get anywhere.
Warspite was Phil’s first serious attempt at a game on the C64 before coding the likes of Havok, Taskforce and LA Drugs Bust etc.
Later, Phil sent it to Commodore Disk User who paid for submissions. Phil thinks they accepted it but Phil never got any money and in the end the game was never published. It’s unsure why Commodore Disk User never did, but if in 1991 time it could be because they folded.
Eventually Phil gave the game away to a guy called Mark who was part of the Fusion cracking group and this is how the game is around today. The story complete and nothing to search for.
Case closed!…
The War of the Worlds was produced by CRL in association with ORP, and judging from the advert it was slated for release on a slew of platforms, but only seems to have made it out for the ZX Spectrum.
The game itself is described as an arcade adventure game, and seems to mix graphical text adventure format with basic arcade features. The spectrum version reminded every reviewer at Crash magazine of the game Valhalla.
To complete the game you have to visit several places in the correct order and find the Martian base. According to Crash, knowing the album helps you figure it out as they are in the same order as the hero visits them on the record, but according to Sinclair User you can’t complete the game without knowing the album.
Perhaps the most obvious reason why the game was pulled on other formats was due to poor reviews in both Crash and Sinclair User?
Well, in 2013 – programmer Jeff Lee got in touch and informed GTW64 that the game was cancelled in the Autumn of 1985. It is suggested that the game was indeed cancelled after Jeff Wayne got cold feet after poor reviews of the Spectrum game.
The game overall was to be a right to left scroller on the C64, which used extended background mode and featured a warship sailing around the Kent coast to do battle with the tripods. There were to be other levels apparently – which may have been the arcade adventure elements. It would have been quite different to the version seen on the ZX Spectrum.
Unfortunately, it never really got past the design stage, and Jeff only managed to get a prototype scroll engine going before it was canned. Regarding sound – Jay Derrett later confirmed that he had no involvement on the C64 version at all and never started anything.
Sadly it seems that Jeff no longer has anything of the game, so for now check out the Creator Speaks for details about the game directly from him. Could well be soon a case closed.
Referring to the Sinclair User review…
“You play an evil Wizard who’s castle of darkness has been attacked by those nasty forces of good.
So, being the nasty type you are, you natuarlly go off into the deepest levels of this fortress of evil to wipe out the do-gooders. It’s not bad enough that they’ve invaded your privacy, they’ve taken all your best phantoms, and would you credit it? – they’ve turned them against you.”
The game was advertised in magazines such as CVG in 1986, and was brought to GTW’s attention thanks to Lee Theasby who kindly provided the advert scan. It was originally believed that the game was no-where to be seen on any platform, but thanks recently to Leszek Chmielewski, we have discovered that this game does infact exist on the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad and can be found here: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0005634
Nuno Cardoso also confirmed that the game even had a conversion to the Atari ST and an Amiga version was also planned but abandoned it seems.
The game is a filmation based game, in similiar vein to Fairlight and Alien 8. It sadly didn’t get as good as a reception as the original games, but it was an ok affair overall. Even though there is a Spectrum release, there was never any sign of the C64 conversion. Looking at the type of game it was, it could well be that a conversion started was too slow.
However, Fairlight made it, so surely Warlock could have followed from the same house?
Trevor Inns would have been a good candidate to do the conversion work after his stearling efforts with Fairlight and Bobby Bearing, but he had no involvement on this one. Maybe he left by the time of Warlock, and therefore there wasn’t anyone around who could do a justifyable conversion.
All speculation, but there is the possibility that this was ported or converted in some form, and we need to do some digging around to see what we can find. Maybe some people from The Edge could get in touch and let us know more?
So for the time being, this C64 conversion a mystery and hopefully something will turn up very soon about this title. Dig your magazines out! :)
Does anyone know about this game or have any snippets of information?
The source of this next entry is interesting as it was mentioned in "Illegal" pirate fanzine as something seen at PC 1988 show (or so it seems) by SSD of Cosmos.
At present we know very little about the game and there seems to be no information on the web about it. But was this game infact "Shoot Out"?
Do you know any more?
GTW presents what could have been very similiar to Newcomer… and it seems that this game was the reason for its demise.
This game is an unfinished Hungarian RPG, which was started in 1992, and cancelled in 1994 as the team felt that they could not compete with the Newcomer game which was in development at the time.
Very unfortunate, though the programmer on his website has left the game open for discussion, and asks the userbase if people still wish to see the game… http://www.freeweb.hu/bithunter/vandorlasok.htm
I don’t feel that the game will ever be completed, though it would be nice to preserve what remains and allow people to see what could have been. At the moment no contact has been made, as there is a language barrier present.
Hopefully Viktor will help us get in touch, and also translate some of the documents on the site which explain the game and its concept it much greater detail.
Its very early days with this game, but a very interesting one from the shots which are now online…
Interesting RPG from Hungary…
Trying to improve on their abysmal "Micro Machine" game, Patriot Games tried their luck with "Wabbit".
Sadly, this just makes things worse. With a simple hi-res bunny which jumps across the screen (Though animating nicely), while you take aim and try to shoot it.
The target is hard to control, and all you do is shoot the rabbit as many times as possible to let your points go up. Nothing original at all, and not very playable.
Graphically overall very poor, and lacking a lot to make it a popular game. Music is good though, but thats about it.
Maybe Patriot did a later version with much more, but until we find and ask them, we may only be left with this poor game.
Not the best game ever… beaten just by Groovy Garden…
Worron is a rather bizarre little title, which was never advertised, and only came about thanks to Richard Paynter getting in touch to shed some light on the title. Rick signed a contact with Firebird in October 1987 to complete this particular game, and this was written about a year or two after winning an Elite competition, where Richard had met Colin Fuidge (who presented his award).
The game itself was a top down Sabre Wulf style game, with a hint of platform action mixed in according to Richard. Bas-relief graphics were used to good effect to give the perception of depth going into the screen. For instance, you could only run over platforms when they were at the correct level. The game also included some jazzy parallax scrolling and all kinds of nice little features. Apparently, Mark Greenshields was so impressed with the scrolling, he borrowed the routine for one of his games.
Everything was signed off with Firebird, and the game was delivered about 2 weeks later. Richard also got an advanced royalty cheque too – but that was it. Richard went to work with Paranoid Software for a bit, before then going off to University. Throughout that time he never saw Worron appear in the shops.
Thanks to Richard Hewison’s investigations, we found out that Colin Fuidge (who had signed up the game), had been drunk when he originally agreed to sign the title, and when the final version turned up – he didn’t like it. With work going on with setting up Silverbird, the title was put to one side with the hope of maybe trying to rescue it. When it was side-lined though, it was completely forgotten about. So that is why it never got to the shops!
When we asked Richard for a copy of the game though, he sadly had no longer kept any of his disks. The likelihood of ever finding it even from an ex-Firebird employee was looking bleak. Until that is we received a last batch of Darren Melbourne’s disks in December 2015 – where we were happy to discover two builds of the game, including the version sent to Firebird!
Although the game is well presented and (to be fair) is an early effort from Richard, we think that Colin was right that the game wasn’t quite there. It has lots of promise, but there are a fair few things broken in the game which don’t make it too playable overall.
What is odd, is that although the game seems to be mostly complete (with an ending screen) – it doesn’t seem to match the descriptions that we have heard about the game. It also does not include any sound, apart from on the high-score table. Is it possible that we are missing a slightly later version? Richard confirms that there may have been a slightly different version, where you could interact with the holes that appear in the ground – but its pretty close to the final version created. There was never any sound in the game, apart from the high-score and it was for Firebird to add at a later date.
Richard was amazed to see his game again after so many years, but the fact that the game was never quite seemingly in a finished state in 2015 had bothered him. In early 2021, Richard contacted GTW once more to say that he was busy working on finishing off Worron and polishing it up a bit. Then in May 2021, he got in touch again to say that he was done.
Amazingly, Richard has painstakingly decompiled the original code that GTW had salvaged and then carried out the following fixes and additions (which we have copied directly from Richard’s rundown):
Essentially, Richard has made sure the game can now be completed without bugs, and feels its pretty stable now and as complete as he’s prepared to make it. One thing to note is that he didn’t want to make the game better or easier to play, and states that it is what it is. There were just a few things at the time missing that were an itch to Richard that needed to be scratched.
So here is the very final edition of Worron in a now full game and complete state. Shortly afterwards, he kindly also provided a copy of his development diary, which is an amazing 103 pages and chock full of technical detail of how he put everything together.
Additionally, in August 2021 – Richard kindly passed on the music he produced for Worron before creating as a SID version for the game. Here is what Richard had to say:
“Hi Frank – something you may or may not want to add to your site is that I mocked-up the Worron music in Logic Pro before adding it to my music routine – it’s pretty much the same music albeit without the rapid SID arpeggios:
I’ve also included screen shots of the score in Logic Pro + a mid-file version just for the hell of it; you can play the mid file in VLC or most players, or pull it into garage band or similar. But it gives an interesting insight into how you use 3 channels and fill it with notes. I mean, I’m a SID novice, and this was my first SID tune, so I’m not SID expert; but it’s interesting nonetheless.”
This is my SoundCloud account which is massively out of date, but which I’m planning to populate with everything I’ve been up to over the past 10 years +
And here is a link to a Land rover advert that I did the music for:
Finally in July 2023, Richard decided to try and put his music through an oscilloscope type filter, which has been popular of late on YouTube. So here it is!
This is why we love what we do at Games That Weren’t. The preservation efforts of a last remaining copy of someone’s work has allowed them to revisit and scratch an itch. We hope there will be many more instances like this.
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