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.

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Star Fighter

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

A promising sideways SEU, featuring some fair graphics and attackwaves.

Originally I heard of Parade’s game from the pages of Commodore Scene magazine, but as time passed, so did any sight of this game.

The game isn’t that bad, but isn’t quite in the same league as Armalyte or other space SEU’s. The game’s music has to go for a start, which doesn’t suit the game at all, maybe something a bit more upbeat.

It’s unknown why the game was never completed, it could have been due to the lack of financial support, or for whatever reason. It seemed many games were abandoned as work commitments, university or cracks occured unexpectidly.

Sadly, apart from Parade, there are no other credits which can be pinned to the game. Hopefully because of how recent the game is, it should be quite easy to track the people behind the game to find out more.

Not too bad a SEU…

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Starburst

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

Yet another game in the games explosion, this time a 90’s Space Invaders clone.

Being created by some talented German coders, this game promised huge gurdians, new look sprites and tons of power-ups. Very much similar to ‘Mega Starforce’ in most ways. It was going to be a huge task trying to capture the addictiveness of the original and improve it to make it a game of the 90’s.. but it could have been pulled off with no problem.

The coders unfortunately decided suddenly that they were not going to complete the game, and went on to other projects.

This unfortunately didn’t help Visualise very much. All that remains is a preview that got around, which you can see for yourself.

Not a bad looking game, but not much else here…

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Space Talisman

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

A title which we have somewhat overlooked until someone resurrected the forum post on Lemon 64…

Space Talisman (Or Labyrinth as its also known) is an early version of Hero Of The Golden Talisman, which is quite a bit different, featuring different music, screens, enemies and a rather bizzare swimming animation!

The game was first brought to light by eregil, a poster on Lemon64 who had the game on a pirated games compilation. He backed this up and showed people on the forum this very strange discovery. The game at this point was known as Labyrinth, though no titles screen to exist in the game.

It seems that an earlier version was leaked, and this was it. Potentially Shaun could have programmed this version for Mr Chip software before they fully started getting software released on the Mastertronic label. It’s possible that the game was signed up on the basis of this version, but with the agreement that it was tidied up and turned into something a bit more appealing. We’re not sure, but Andrew Fisher is now attempting to get hold of Shaun again to find out more about this obscure version.

I’ve cut and pasted some of the evaluation against HOTGT from eregil:

1) Part of the rolling credits are identical. There is the self-interview (with very minor changes), same jokes.

2) HOTGT looks very much like a further elaborated version of “Labyrinth”. Both have 5 sections, in each section you have to solve a puzzle of some sort to advance to the next. HOTGT is more complex since its first section, whereas the first section is very simple in “Labyrinth” and only in the 4th-5th one the puzzles become somewhat challenging. HOTGT has a “mini-map” of sort in the lower-left corner which is missing in “Labyrinth”.

3) “Labyrinth” actually has what seems to me to be a bug of sort, where in the 4th section you can’t get to open a gate which gives you access to the green key – therefore you can only complete the game if you saved a universal key from a previous section to use on the green gate in the 4th one.

A full evaluation can be seen via the map which eregil also produced.

Later, iAN CooG cracked the game under the title of Space Talisman, and which we have also included in the download and kept as the title for now (Unless Shaun says different).

It’s a great little finding, especially as its quite different in some ways. Check it out and do your own comparisons. In the meantime we’ll get digging and try to find out the true story behind this obscure early version…

Does Shaun remember this?… we’ll find out soon!…

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Squish

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

More Apex, more unreleased works now in the form of Squish, a 4 way scrolling isometric squashing game. Possibly similar to Maze Mania, with the aim to squash creatures and have their blood change the colour of tiles. Apparently very violent game according to the Apex guys.

Eventually the idea was dropped as ideas dried up for the game, and again inspiration to finish it was not really there. A good idea, which maybe could have been combined with other ideas they had to make one big game…. but sadly not.

Apex had the following to say in the Mayhem diaries about the game… "This was a game which we designed two years before Creatures 2, and was a four-way scrolling isometric ‘go around squashing things with a mallet’-type affair. The idea behind this was to colour tiles by squashing baddies, their blood changing the tile’s colour. The game had a good violence factor, but the idea was dropped owing to a mental block."

Just how much has survived is anyone’s guess…. all we have currently is a screenshot of the sprites being used. There might be playable versions existing, but again it is down to if Apex will one day dust down their work disks and take a look for lost sources, executables and graphics. We may be lucky one day, but sadly it seems unlikely this will ever see the light of day in any form.

Possibly a sad loss… but could we be surprised one day?…

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Squarez

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Adept software recently released some of its old PC shareware games for free including one called
Squarez deluxe.

On their site they mentioned that the game originally started out as a C64 game called Squarez but was abandoned for the PC version.

On questionning Adam, the game’s coder, he replied that the game was never finished and sadly he has lost all of the work he did on the C64.

So did anyone ever get to see the C64 version?, does it still hang on a disk somewhere?… We may never know, but another GTW to start digging for, and an uncomplete one at that.

Not much known as of yet…

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Spy vs Spy 4

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

Briefly mentioned in a magazine from the mid 80’s, there was apparently plans for a 4th game in the Spy Vs Spy series.

The third game ends with our two spys being blasted into space. Therefore the theme of the 4th game was to be set in a Space Station, which seemed reasonable enough. Most likely doing the same kind of tricks to each other, maybe a bit of gravity in there and other little tricks.

Sadly the game never materialized. After the 3rd game, it was found not financially viable to produce a 4th game, so nothing was ever started.

Richard Spitalny confirms in Retro Gamer #221 that no game design was ever started and the end of the 3rd game was a teaser, as they anticipated there was going to be a 4th game.

So another game we can close the door on with no chance of finding anything! Case closed!

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Spud!

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Rather strange named game, short for Super Powered Urban Device, our next entry is a rather strange SEU where you control a helicopter seemingly in space. It’s very similiar in some ways to the bizzare Airwolf 2 game (Which was a sort of Nemesis clone).

The game is in fairly early stages, and the helicopter can be moved into the score panel etc, so its not that playable.

What is quite interesting about this title is that it seems to have been being written for Firebird software in 1987, and would possibly have had music by Rob Hubbard according to the credits. However it never made it out on the label and nothing more of the game surfaced. Richard Hewison and The Bird Sanctuary know of the game, but do not recall anything about it.

It’s possible that it was hoped that it would get a Firebird release, but was rejected. The game then possibly got sneaked out by the author passing on what was left of the game. The Rob Hubbard link may have been a hopeful thing had the game got signed up by Firebird.

The game’s author went on to produce other games, including a few for The Power House and also Out of this world for Arolasoft. This may have been his first attempt to break into the industry which didn’t quite happen.
Hopefully we’ll track down Darren in the future and find out more about this game.

Do you know anything more about it?…

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Spooky Castle

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

This game is one of the rumoured unreleased 22 Codemasters games which one day we hope to track down and bring to you, like Codemasters should have done a long time ago.

Nothing is known about this game too well, but maybe we’ll find out one day? It is also NOT the same game by Atlantis. This is a different game.

For those who do not know, a story broke in the news pages of Commodore Scene (A popular C64 fanzine in the UK), that Codemasters were confirmed to have 22 unreleased games which were ready to be released, but Codemasters pulled out of the market before any could sneak out.

Some of these games are now known as Bee 52, Grell and Falla, CJ’s 4th… mainly because they have made it out. Others are speculated as CJ In Space and Wacky Pool… The others are a mystery, but rumours suggest they were a few games that Codemasters released on the NES multicarts.

The guy to find out more from?…. Richard Eddy…. He used to work at Codemasters, and is probably the guy to ask. I think he actually confirmed the story a long time ago.

Can anyone help?…

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Splidge and the Snowmen

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

Splidge and the Snowmen was to be a festive game in the mode of one of Richard Bayliss’ previous games Cetimiex. The game was being created 1999 and Richard was going to release Splidge and the Snowmen for the Christmas issue 27 of Commodore Scene magazine, but unfortunately, the game just wasn’t good enough according to Richard.

The game featured non-christmassy music and wasn’t too playable basically – which was the reason behind Richard cancelling the game and not releasing it.

Unfortunately, we are unable to provide a demo of the game, as it was lost due to a disk error and the disk was thrown away.

Sadly this may never see the light of day as a result, but Richard does offer hope that it still may show up and above you can now download the music!

This is an open and shut case it seems…

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Spix

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

Quite early, and a poor mismatch of graphics and sound mixed into this preview. The game feels like a random set of graphics and sprites bolted together to make a quick game.

There doesn’t seem to be much about it, apart from a scrolling backdrop. I hope that someone did do a later version to do the game some justice, as this preview doesn’t.

Thanks to Mariusz Mlynski, we learn that Nicolas Stark was behind the game, as stated here: http://csdb.dk/release/?id=7508 . This is also a later version of the game which features a 2 player mode, logo and collisions.

It is hoped that we may get some info from Nicolas at some point in the future.

Needs a lot more work to be playable…

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