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.

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Turner Software Games

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

Turner Software was the label by Commodore Cracker’s editor Brian Turner. This was his own label where he attempted to inject some new C64 games into the market to save the machine from dying.

Unfortunately the games were just to be SEUCK efforts – but Brian was trying his best by making use of his design/graphical skills. Brian was pretty good with his artwork and layouts, so potentially his SEUCK efforts could have been quite good.

The titles planned for release were:

Danger Dive, Crimefigther and Bunderang.

Here is the article from Commodore Cracker with more details about the games. Did Brian maybe send you a copy of his game?

At present we are not in touch with Brian, but hope to be soon to find out if he still has his games. It would be great to hear from him, so if you’re reading Brian – please get in touch!

Recently we did manage to recover some of Brian’s Danger Dive game, but sadly the background graphics are corrupted. It is a preview showing at least some of the sprites from the game. We hope to find more soon!

More soon on these titles we hope.

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Turn Change

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Yet another puzzler in production for the C64, and unfortunatly very similar to many other puzzlers which have been on the C64 already.

Nice colourful graphics, but that is about it. Nothing much else new to offer in the way of gameplay.

Interestingly in 2010 I had an email from David Vigh who corrected our credits and passed us on some other versions of Turn Change. Very oddly in the preview, the credits are not correct.

Unfortunately, although we have a intro picture and a working title screen – the actual game itself is not fully working. There should be a slightly different version of the puzzle game with a different background image to check out at least. Hopefully in the future we may be able to get these fixed up.

The game was posted to Gremlin Graphics by Zoran Zambo in the early 90’s, but must have been rejected. After this we are not sure what happened – there seems to have been some kind of attempt to revive the game in the mid-90’s, but things died out again.

How far did the game get before it was cancelled is the big question? Hopefully David will be able to shed some light soon…

Another puzzling puzzle for GTW to solve…

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Turbo Tiger Software Titles

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

A large entry which i’ve decided to do for an entire software house’s set of games. You see, not all of Turbo Tiger Software’s games were unreleased but it strangely seems that none exist in any digital form on the web at present even though there was a lot of advertising, so we want to flag everything ever mentioned and tied in with TTS and see if we can help recover most (if not all) of their planned releases.

Melvin P Andrews was the man behind the label and worked from his home at Hull. The last we heard is that TTS moved to Porter Street in Hull, and then they went very quiet. What happened?

Below is a summary of some of the key games with details taken from various fanzines. Followed by other titles which have had a brief mention of some sort.

SEU puzzler (Released with Commodore Cracker)

“An exclusive game again made for us by TTS! It’s a SEUCK game, but as well as a shootin’ section, it’s also a quiz (yes, a quiz with SEUCK!) and a maze game. Answer 15 questions in the quiz level, get ’em right, you score 10 pts get one wrong and you start again. In the shoot-em-up bit, just blast everything you see and in the maze, find the route that gets you the most points. This whole game, as well as being highly original, has strong “Alice in Wonderland” overtones!! CONTROLS: Joystick any port”

Haunted Mansion (1995 – reviewed in Commodore Action)

Magazine Editor (1995 – reviewed in Commodore Action)

Spacelord (SEUCK) (1995 – reviewed in Commodore Action)

FILE T1 (SCAN in Scans folder) (1995 – reviewed in Commodore Action)

TOP DETECTIVE (See gallery for review)

Other titles mention included:

Quiz Master, Magazine editor, Haunted Mansion, Top Detective, Spacelord, Quiz Master, Lub n Lob in space, Jolly Island, Cappin’ Cappy, Pub Buster, Maze Trooper, Blast ’em GP, UFO prisoner, Future CHess, Ball-fighter, GRQ II, Match predictor, GRQ III, AARHH! (Compilation), Kidz Stuff, Hangman Deluxe, UFO – Landed (Sequel to UFO prisoner), Spacelord 2

Melvin also released a compilation called SEUM (Shoot em up mayhem) which was released in 1996 and contained Lub N Lob in space, Spacelord special, UFO Prisoner and Spacelord.

Help us dig out these games. Even though some were apparently poor, it would be great to digitally preserve this work before its lost for good.

UPDATE: 9/1/13 – We have managed to recover pretty much everything of Space Lord from an issue of Commodore Cracker. It was a demo, but just with the rest of the levels not tied in. We have tied them in, and although it says demo – the game is pretty much complete. In addition to this – some of Magazine Editor Demo, but unfortunately it is heavily corrupted – we have offered a download of as much as we can salvage for now.

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 3 Comments

Turbo Cup Challenge

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

A car racing game which was released on the Amiga, Amstrad and Spectrum. A C64 version was mentioned as coming soon in The Games Machine around 1989 time.

The Spectrum version seemed to have got a release only on budget and the original version by Loriciels is still at large… http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0005458

Loriciels went on to survive until around 1993, so its possible they deemed the C64 and Spectrum platforms to be weak in comparison to the Amstrad in the homeland of France. The Amstrad was the only major 8-bit machine to natively support the French SECAM TV standard – other systems needed specialised monitors to display in colour (hence it’s status as the biggest machine there) – thanks to Martin Smith for that contribution!

With a complete Spectrum release, Loriciels may have just sold it off cheap to a budget label to recoup some money. If this was the case, it is likely the C64 version didn’t get far as otherwise Players would have released on the C64 too. In one magazine, it was suggested in the Amiga review that the Spectrum version was due in January 1989 and the C64 version in February 1989 … suggesting it was behind.

However, Martin/Stadium has found that the C64 edition was listed in the loading instructions for the Spectrum/Amstrad edition. PDF is attached.

We know little more at the moment, so its early days. Do you know anything?

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 5 Comments

Tujad

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

Tujad was a arcade maze based game which was released on the Spectrum and Amstrad (http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0005448). It got above average reviews, but overall wasn’t that bad a game.

An early advert for the game mentioned the C64 was having a conversion, but it seems they must have had problems converting and the game was cancelled as a result. Need confirmation on this, but it certainly seems the case. A news item also briefly mentioned the game in Commodore User magazine – see scans.

We got in touch with Geoff Phillips after noticing he did the C64 conversion of Mighty Bombjack – we found that he was involved with Orpheus, and suggested that Richard Wilkins may have had involvement on the C64 version. We’ll try and get hold of Richard to find out more and what happened to the game.

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 2 Comments

Tuc

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Nah, its nothing to do with Cheeze biscuits or Consevative Party conferences in Brighton, but is a rather early version of a Mayhem clone.

When I say "Clone", it seems to be just that, with most the graphics seem to be heavily copied from the classic platformer, just with a new main character.

The preview has got a lot of glitches and looks nowhere near as fluid as Mayhem does. Very early times for this game, which also has no sound.

It’s unknown how close this would have been to Mayhem in its gameplay, but it would be interesting to find out if TUC ever got to a more playable stage.

No credits are attatched to this mysterious game, which is a shame, as it makes things much harder to work with.

Mayhem would be pissed at this game…

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Trumps

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

A quick entry for a game which was reviewed in Commodore Cracker issue 4. This was a card game that was being sold from a homebrew developer for a very cheap price. It was described as a well made game which came with a number of other cool programs on the tape/disk.

Nothing seems to have surfaced of the game on any archive.

The game was a main program on a compilation tape released by Daniel Mossop back around 1995 time. It is a card game of the same name where you have up to 4 players and the aim is to knock your opponents out of the game by leaving them with no piles.

Commodore Cracker’s review stated that the game came with very clear instructions and good presentation, with big clear card graphics. The other programs that came with the game were Diary and Upside Down Letter.

Overall, it would be good to try and find this game – is Daniel Mossop out there still with a tape somewhere!

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Trouble

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

A game being produced by R Pedersen, who developed a number of games which never made the light of day.
The games were all made in MSDOS first, then ported easily over to the C64 and Apple machines.

This game came to light thanks to an interview with Roger at http://www.gamedev.net/columns/interviews/rpederson.asp. The game is based on the board game of the same name.

Roger tells GTW that the game was created initially on the IBM PC, and was due to have a C64 conversion created. The IBM version was not paid for however, and therefore the C64 version was never fully developed or released. It might have had a test conversion started, but we’re not too sure.

It is hopeful that we may find some remains of this game, though it is not very likely… we’re more likely to find a full version of Myth 2… :)

Is it nearly case closed on this one?…

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Trojan

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

A big finding for GTW, thanks to Zeldin/Cascade, who came across a bizarre set of files on a bunch of second hand disks. These were named Trojan Demo 1 + 2.

Upon further examination, it seems that the preview was of an early conversion of a Capcom arcade (http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?game_id=10202). A bit more digging and we found that Elite were in fact linked to the conversion for the ZX Spectrum here.

When we queried things with Steve Wilcox from Elite, he mentioned that they considered it but Capcom’s commercial terms were unrealistic and the game only “middling”. Funnily enough the Elite evidence is very strong, as there is a message from the programmer which says “I would have liked to have written Scooby Doo”.

The previews we have are of a working title screen and high-score, and of a scrolling part of level 1. None of it is playable, but the files are labelled 1 and 3, which means that a second file is actually missing and could well be out there somewhere. Just how the game got leaked anyway in this current form we don’t know, but we believe that it was on a BBS. Maybe someone has all the files, and maybe part 2 is actually a playable version? Do you know where it is?

We believe that the development was by Durell, and quite likely Ron Jeffs – who was their main C64 developer. This means that Rob Hubbard would have been doing the music (who had Trojan listed down in his invoice history). Clive Townsend confirmed he did the ZX version at Durell and recalls seeing the other versions in development too. The ZX version thankfully has been saved in its final state.

In 2012 we did have reason to believe that FTL (part of Gargoyle Games) was behind the conversion, though we need to track down Roy Carter and Greg Follis to confirm for sure, but then many moons ago we found some odd ninja sprites tucked away in the Hitpak version of 1942 (see gallery). Could these potentially have been intended for Trojan? If so, then it suggests that the developer could well have been Stephen Green who did 1942. But our money is still on Ron Jeffs.

Interestingly, in late 2024 – Michael Huth / C64preservation.de found an advert for the game in a US manual for Bionic Commando. It asks the question whether Capcom USA had another team doing a conversion or if they were planning to utilize a UK development.

If you know anything more or can help us find the missing second file – then please do get in touch.

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