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

Troddlers V1

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

It was always thought that Alter Developments would be doing the C64 conversion of Troddlers, if anyone. It was announced they were trying to do Troddlers in an issue of Commodore Force. These were the same team who brought you Lemmings on the C64.

However, the guys from SCS-TRC were also trying to get the contract, so there was a bit of competition there.

The Alter Development version of Troddlers consisted of 6 levels which looked good and would work very well. These levels were done for the purpose of demonstration to Sales Curve. The SCS-TRC version looked more impressive, and so it got the contract away from Alter.

Sales Curve continued with the project with the other team, and eventually they pulled out of the market and decided not to go with any more C64 stuff. The game would have been canned anyway. Alter had already stopped work on their version anyway, so that was that.

Remi says that he felt sad that Sales Curve didn’t continue, and what with their past work, you would expect the conversion to be very good.

Remi told GTW that the previews may still exist in his disk collection, and hopefully they would be uncovered….

….Well.. its happened!!!… Thanks to the game’s programmer, Niels Brouwers, we bring you the first ever glimpse of the original conversion that was taking place. Niels got in touch with GTW, and kindly passed on all the previews which existed.

All in all this contains 6 playable levels and a few pictures which would have been included in the game.

Although it does not look as polished as the accepted contract version, this contains more playable aspects of the original game. No doubt in time, this would have been tweaked and improved at the end. It still looks an impressive conversion, and there is much more here to look at.

It is interesting to compare both versions, but essentially with the two versions there is a half complete version of Troddlers. Sadly the game is missing music, but we are unsure if any was actually composed for this version. We will try and find out soon.

Check it out and see what you think :)

Found at last, and another case pretty much closed!…

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 1 Comment

Tran

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

A game by Steve Collins of Herobotix and Badlands fame. Tran was fully completed apart from the music. Sadly when presented, Hewson rejected it, due to striking similarities to another title on their label. All this, even though it got good review scores internally within Hewson.

Steve could not find time to get someone else to publish it, as he was busy at college, and so it gathered dust and remained lost.

The game is based around a sideways space scroller in the mould of Defender, Uridium, Parallax and R-type, with the usual arsenal of weapon upgrades. The aim is to simply blast enemy crafts and collect orbs. When enough are collected, you are able to land and take control of the man on terrain, blasting enemies and saving hostages whom are imprisoned by blowing doors up with bombs. Once all the hostages are saved, its time to find your ship and blast off.

When fully specked, you have 6 orbiting droid orbs, each with a laser cannon. You can have forward and rear double cannons and also side strafing bazookas.

Originally, Tran was first heard about after Steve’s site was stumbled across, where he mentioned two unreleased games he worked on. Tran was one of them, and after contacting Steve, he confirmed that Tran still existed at home in Ireland.

In 2004, Steve found the last known copy of Tran on a small black tape and posted it to GTW. The tape was tested, and the game worked straight away. After converting over to a TAP file and some fixing to a .PRG file by TMR. The game can now proudly be hosted on GTW for all of you to enjoy for the first time ever.

It is a space blaster, typical of 1987 with some great highlights, some nice graphics and starfield and some classic gameplay which can now be enjoyed by the gameplaying public as intended.

A long lost game found and released… Case closed!

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Trac Troopa

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

While I was away doing exams and coursework in 2004, a few games suddenly surfaced out of nowhere, and Trac Troopa was one of the pleasant surprises to surface from an ex-C64 programmer’s work disk. Jon Williams is not to be confused with the Jon Williams of “First Samurai” fame, but was another developer from the 80’s with a programming talent.

Jon and his friends created what is known as Trac Troopa, a sideways scrolling tile based game in a similar form to Bounder.

Graphically the game is quite impressive, with a decent array of sprites with hi-res overlays. Sonically there was nothing here, unless you count the tune that Richard Bayliss later added. Both versions before and after are included in the zip.

The game was touted to companies such as Firebird, Mastertronic, Codemasters and Gremlin. It was the last company which showed a keen interest, but pen was sadly never put to paper and the game was never released. Funnily enough, Gremlin had not yet released their Bounder game, so maybe
they borrowed a few ideas from Jon’s game?

Anyway, after a set of unsuccessful attempts to market the game, Trac Troopa was laid to rest on its work disk and put away in the attic to gather dust. After worrying about losing the game forever, Jon transferred the game to PC and then onto CD. It was in 2004 when he was requested to dig the game out, and finally it was released into the C64 world for the first time.

So here is the game that should have been snapped up by one of the big budget companies, or even full price companies. Sadly, Jon didn’t have the luck he deserved. But at last, Jon is now able to gain the credit for his hard work that he deserves, and GTW is proud the present the full game with all the documents and also some rare designs of the game’s graphics.

A full GTW game launched and playable… Case closed!…

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Touchstone

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Touchstone was a rather ambitious RPG/graphic adventure game which was being developed for Origin by Sensible Software, back in the days when Martin Galway was part of Sensible Software.

Zzap 64, issue 61, ran an article on Sensible Software and first gave details about the game, with the following being printed:

Sensi embarked on a massive RPG adventure titled Touchstone (remember the band?). "For two years we had been working on the gameplay and story for Touchstone, a traditional storyline fantasy RPG but with a twist in it. It became so big and very intricate. We originally wanted the player to be able to approach the game through one of the many plots and sub-plots.

Origin decided that the American market [that it was primarily aimed at] was changing towards the Nintendo consoles. There was no deadline as such but admittedly we weren’t making much progress. Origin are good to work with and it was an amicable decision to stop the project in November of last year (1989).

The project is now dead but we still hold the copyright and we’d dearly love to see it come to life. The good thing about it is that it’s adaptable. As we’ve worked on the story for 18 months; and the gameplay for 6 months, it can be a text adventure, a Cinemaware-style game, even an arcade adventure, whatever – a game to suit the client."

As yet there’s no word on any interested software house. Fingers crossed though.

A very long period of time was spent on the game as you can see, but its believed that very little C64 code was actually produced and a lot more time was spent on storyboarding and also the Amiga version.

Very strangely, Martin Galway was the main coder on the game whilst Chris Yates got on with other projects. Things as a result were slow as Martin (according to interviews) was not a prolific games programmer. The platform kept changing too – starting on the C64, the game was moved from the C64 to the Amiga and then to the PC platform.

Unfortunately no version was ever to get a release. So much time was spent on the game, and no end product was forming that in the end Origin decided to pull the plug on the project. Sensible Software got to retain the copyright for the game, and still hold it today.

It is unknown how much of a C64 conversion exists, but it is likely only to be a series of tech demos. Who has these?… Potentially Martin or Chris will still have some disks with remains of the game. There is to be no music found, as unfortunately Martin never got chance to compose the music due to spending more time on the programming of the game itself.

This game is something of a well remembered title for the Sensible Software guys – it took up a large part of their lives, and they still believe that the game has massive potential. There was even rumour once of it being ressurrected for the new platforms of today, but nothing has sadly materialized. For a game respected so much by its creators, this sounds like something very special to find. Hopefully if the Sensible guys uncover anything, we’ll be able to bring it to you (And maybe even Amiga/PC versions for our relative sister websites).

Hopefully we’ll dig up more soon on this intriguing RPG. For now, check out Creator Speaks for notes from the creators (From different sources).

More soon we hope…

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Touchlight

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

The game was being built for Palace Software by John Menzies and John Cassells and was a horizontal scrolling SEU with bitmapped backgrounds and a sprite plex. The game used VSP to scroll the screen, which was a risky technique to use, as it wasn’t stable on some C64s.

Jason Kelk actually had the soundtrack on his disks, composed by Sean Connolly when he was still in Pulse Productions (complete with sampled drums). This was dug out and recovered for this GTW entry and can be found in the download below.

The game itself is amazing for its time, and even though it was created pre-90’s, you can see just how much this game could have done well for Palace. Featuring wonderful backdrops and creatures to blast, also with a impressive set of weaponry.

John Cassells got in touch with GTW and informed us that the game was cancelled as they could not guarantee that the scroll routine would work on every C64 machine. A huge disappointment, and something which we had thought could probably be improved/fixed these days due to breakthroughs with VSP. Raistlin/G*P however confirmed that although Safe VSP was available, due to the nature of how Touchlight works, it would be impossible to use to fix the issues.

Thankfully, a rather large preview of the game has long been out there, cracked by Babygang, featuring pretty much all of 5 levels, apart from the final two which only really have the background graphics. So check it out for yourself!

Next we hope to get hold of John Menzies to learn more about its development and before we close the case on the title. We assume that the leaked preview is all that ever existed.

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Topsy Turvy

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

It was meant to be a nice conversion for the cool budget kings of Flair, Microvalue. Eventually it turned out to be a nightmare for the game’s developer.

Topsy Turvy was being developed for Microvalue back in 1992 by Jed Adams (Who previously had worked on Putty and Fuzzball).

This was a conversion of an Atari ST game where you solved puzzles by flipping up and down from the top and bottom of the screen. Not much else is known about the actual puzzles involved. All we know is that the main character could not jump.

Music is unknown, but it was likely to be either Adam Gilmore or Sean Connolly.

Although completed, Microvalue wanted Jed to add loads of extras which were not in the agreement that Jed had been set to. Once Jed refused to do these extras, Microvalue lost Jed £750.

This was it, and the game was scrapped… no-one else came along and finished the title off. Jed had hoped that a cracker had sneaked it out, as what happened with Space Veg Corp, but sadly it doesn’t seem to be the case.

Jed sadly does not have anything of the game anymore… so it is very unlikely that this game may ever be found. That is, unless someone from Flair may still have something. But this is very unlikely.

So for now, we sit and wait.. and hope that something turns up out of the blue.

A puzzling end for a nifty sounding puzzler…

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Talisman

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

Yet another title enters the archives, and this time by the development team behind Lemmings on the Amiga.

This was obtained from DMA Design’s own tribute webpage, and was released into the world by Mike Dailly for people to check out.

It is a sideways scrolling SEU with some borrowed sprites from Armalyte due to the fact that Mike had no graphic artist to help him.

It is a rather small play area, though there is some nice graphics and parts of the level close in and out to try and crush your player. The attack waves are quite simple at the moment, though there is a element of playability present in this early demo.

This game was created after Menace, and got Mike the contract to do Balistix on the C64. The game got shelved for unknown reasons. But its possible that Blood Money was started instead, which Mike states that the game had a few bits from this game.

This really is as far as the game ever got, so you won’t find anything more to look at. A promising looking title, but sadly never to be, but at least we had Blood Money! :)

A relic from DMA designs and a nice one too. Case closed…

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Thunderzone

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

This is a promising looking preview of a game which reminds me slightly of Cyberdyne Warrior. Its a nice preview, with some fair (If jumbled) graphics in places. The main sprite moves very well and in places the graphics look nice, like in the shop screen. The preview features no sound, and it has recently come to light about the game’s existance thanks to its coder, Kevin Murphy.

You may remember Kevin for his game "Thrustaball" which appeared on ZZap’s covertape back in the early 90’s. Kevin created a variety of good quality games, but sadly never got the break he deserved.

After/during the new incarnation of Thrustaball to be sold abroad (Mega Thrustaball), Kevin was working on Thunderzone, which was probably his most ambitious of his game creations. Various levels and bits were created with the intention of probably going Multiload.

As quoted from "Creator Speaks", Kevin describes the game… "The idea of the game, was basically to trudge about the various levels shooting at and blowing up various unstable nuclear reactors, using teleports to zip about the level and shooting aliens and collecting pickups and credits to spend on weapon upgrades in a shop."

The game was sent to Legendary Designs on various occasions in its various forms for playtesting, and feedback was given for improvements etc.

The game got to quite an advanced state, more advanced than what can be seen from this "Very early preview", as Kevin describes it. Later it had a full working shop, fully upgradable weapons, aliens and sfx. There was also a variety of levels created too.

Unfortunately, due to Mega Thrustaball not being sold and Kevin not recieving the payment he was due, he lost heart in the project and scrapped it. So at the time just an advanced preview existed (Near to completion). The game was later to resurface in 1997 under another programmer taking the helm. (This also got scrapped and no further progress was really made).

Kevin sadly does not have any of his work any longer, though there are two places to look.

For one, Legendary Designs will have a later preview if members still exist. A developer called Michael Reichmuth, who worked on Thunderzone and started up the project again in 1997, is also someone else who is likely to have the later versions. Other than that, Kevin mentioned a friend who possibly may have still had copies of all his work… and guess what!…. He DID!….

Jason Steele had very luckily kept all his disks from 20 odd years ago, and still had all of Kevin’s old work and has very kindly backed it all up and preserved it for Kevin!… Kevin has released all of the new work, and now GTW has added the extra bits to the archive
too.

You can now find some new bits in the download link! :-) …. The new version, includes aliens, the ability to purchase new weapons and 2 levels. There were actualy 3 levels designed but Kevin is pretty sure the third level is now lost forever.

Now included in the zip file are 2 new .d64 files. The file T1.d64 contains the game v2.prg file, this is level 2 of the game. The file T2.d64 contains the TZ Demo.prg file and this is a version of level 1 of the game, with player to alien collision detection disabled and maximum credits, so the player can purchase all the weapons and explore the level. There are also editors and bits which were used for the game, and also a logo of somekind for the game.

Some fantastic findings, and we are very glad to add these to the archive with this preview!… A big thanks to Jason Steele for helping preserve more of Kevin’s game!….

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Thruster Ball

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Many of you may remember this game from the later days of Zzap64, created by Kevin Murphy, whom originally tried to sell the game through mail order.

Well, before that, Thrusterball was sent to various big games companies of the time, and sadly none submitted any interest in the game, which is why Kevin turned to selling the game. The game didn’t seem to sell that well, so eventually Kevin sold the game to Zzap 64 and they put it on their covertape.

Thrusterball is very similiar to the classic Cybernoid series on the C64, featuring a very similiar style of play and graphics. The game didn’t feature any music, but did feature a set of neat sfx.

The game played very well, and its a mystery why no company picked this game up and released it. Maybe not a full price label, but certainly a budget label should have done.

Apart from the bad start, the game was to be given a new lease of life when Legendary Designs got in contact with Kevin about tarting up the game and selling it abroad. Kevin agreed and so work begin on tidying up the game and improving the presentation.

All of this was complete, and money was told to be transferring into Kevin’s account very soon. This never happened and Kevin was left unpaid, and the game also never made it out as intended.

In the GTW archive exists both versions of the game that was created, and its an indication of a man’s work which sadly was not as recognised as it should have been.

Credit is well overdue for this and other games of Kevin’s…

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 1 Comment

Tears of Rage

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

Tears of Rage was an RPG title talked about briefly within issues of both Commodore Format and Zzap!64 during the early 90’s. An up and coming game from U.S. Gold. Nothing was much known about the game until we heard from the developers themselves.

Fully titled as “The Rain, My tears of Rage” , the game was being programmed by Esprit Software Programs, initially on the C64 by Lance Mason, Paul Crawley & Mike Brown. It would have been a sort of upgraded version on the “Pool of Radiance” according to the team.

It had been rumoured to have been binned because it was such an immense job to convert from ST/Amiga and never got beyond the initial visual stages. The game however progressed quite well on the 16 bit machines, but as usual, Esprit was running well over deadline and budget when it was apparently cancelled by U.S. Gold.

However, both Lance and Paul got in contact and helped shed some light by giving their accounts (which you can see under “Creator Speaks”). Apparently the game’s engine blew away anything else that existed at the time.

Unfortunately Esprit were not allowed to use the AD&D licence that a US company had, which U.S. Gold had a contract with, therefore U.S. Gold canned production.

According to Paul, the company behind Eye Of The Beholder were not happy with what they were seeing, and saw an engine which could wipe the floor with theirs.

Paul suggests that U.S. Gold were the only people to have all the source code for the game, and so chances of finding anything could be hard.

However, Lance felt he still may have something and even found copies of the game on other formats. We are hoping to get hold of these at least to add to the site.

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 4 Comments