Preserving Cancelled & Unreleased Video Game History Since 1999
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.
Thanks to Jan Harries for highlighting this one, but when Rob Hubbard was asked to list all of the tunes he produced on the C64 – he turned up a few which never actually saw release (The game included).
One such game was “Spirit of Adventure” and was to be released by Mastertronic and to include music by Rob. After searching around on the web, we found no trace or details about the game apart from a 1992 release on the Amiga by Starbyte, which no doubt will be a different game altogether.
It was confirmed in 2015 by Chris Abbott and Rob Hubbard, that Spirit of Adventure turned into Phantom of the Asteroid, which was given away from Rob’s notes due to the inclusion of Martin Ellis’ name. Also … Phantom = Spirit? Geddit?? :)
Therefore, there is nothing to look for and it is very much thankfully a…
This is a game originally intended for release by Starlight, who I think did Rolling Ronny, amoungst other games. Sadly Starlight went under, but thanks to Marco, it has been confirmed that the game was later released by CP Verlag in Germany.
Therefore we close the case on this game, and you can find the complete version here… http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?h=0&id=7192
Spikey and The Search For Rip was a Graphic Adventure Creator based game which was quite good according to Jon Wells. It was submitted to Visualize back in 1994 and placed on their “Coming soon” list, listed as due for October 1994.
Although Jon was sent the complete game, he wanted to enhance it first, but never found enough time to do so. In the end – Spikey never made it to full release and remains unreleased to this day.
The game’s author is also unknown at present, but Jon is hoping to dig out the game and pass it onto GTW to release in its current form.
It’s great to hear that this Visualize title was infact completed and would be playable if found, so its promising news for GTW and one we hope to bring you soon!
Another game which was said to be released from Kele Line in 1987 (Mentioned in Soft magazine). It is another title from Kele Line which we know little about, but we can guess what happened to it anyway. Maybe it was a jet fighter game in early Afterburner style?
The company sadly went bankrupt in late 1987 and as a result any developments were scrapped. Nothing has ever been seen of the game and there was just a mention in a Zzap interview with Kele Line.
Thanks to Mads (apologies for the delay!), this was to be a game by Søren (Sodan) Grønbech with potentially graphics by Torben Bakager. There was a snippet in Danish magazine ICRUN-1987-January which translates to “No one will tell you anything about Speed Fighter, Søren Grønbech’s next project. It is very secret.”
Jazzcat got hold of Søren who sadly confirmed that the game was never finished, and that he no longer had any of his disks. He had this to say about the game itself:
“Flying around with a spaceship in pre-generated tunnels. I made the gfx myself with a 3D program”.
Sounds great, but sadly it seems that without some kind of miracle, we may never see it!
Apparently this game was actually stolen from German company "E.P.S" by Coco Industries, who cracked this game.
A little bit sad, as the preview doesn’t seem to tell a lot about the game, apart from its a Star Wars based game.
It seems to be a preview of the character information screens, which doesn’t indicate what the style of the actual game was to be about. The information for each character is fairly blank, and there is a date included, possibly for when each character was created.
This may even just be a demonstration of the main controllable characters for the game for a magazine or another company, its not known.
It seems as the event of the game being stolen may have halted progress of its creation. Just how far the game reached before being cancelled is unknown. The game was actually promised for late 1988, and never surfaced at that time.
No credits exist in the program, so trying to find this game and what it was about is going to be a very difficult task, especially because of the year the game was stolen.
Yet another title found in 2004 by Triad, and another game by Dirk Conrad… this time a futuristic Archon style game with space ships.
This is a complete and very nice strategy game which strangely has never been released as with Ant Eater… a huge shame, and it is a wonder just why.
At one point in the game, two ships can meet and play in a minimal "Combat" style encounter, depending on their positions on the grid.
Not much else is currently known about a game which needs a lot of research to actually find out why it is a GTW, and not a Gamebase released game entry.
Space Tracker was mentioned very early on Issue 9 of Zine 64, defined as follows:
"In this Elite style game – you must interact with other characters, fight and deal with them to be successful… Could be very promising!"
As with most games detailed at this time, they mostly were vapourware – but in the case of Space Tracker – the game was fairly well advanced and a preview managed to sneak out – which you can download from here. The game isn’t very Elite like, but more like Ultima in space.
The developers state at the start of the preview that the game is actually quite old, and they have just produced the demo to show what is coming up. A lot more was promised, and we guess that Elite styled space battles would be part of the game.
Of course, the reason why the game is reviewed here is because it never quite got finished. We don’t know just how much further it progressed from this preview, but with credits listed – we hope to find out soon!
Advertised in BigK magazine, Spacestation Alpha was sadly another title which was never to see the light. The C64 version was stated as coming soon.
The game was described as follows on the advert:
"A graphical space battle – The deadly cylon fleet has reached its destination. Their objective – destroy planet earth. Each ship in the fleet carries a single devastating lithium torpedo. Earth sheilds are up but their power is beign drained. You, as commander of earth’s last remainign space station are all that stands between the cylons and earth’s total obliteration."
The game we assume is a Space Raiders style game which was quite popular around the time. This could well have been a clone of somekind. The BBC version was released and apparently well recieved.
We don’t know much else about the game apart from these details, so there is a long way to go to get any information on it.
A very short entry for now for a game that was one of many that never quite made it from Crystal Software back in the later end of the 90’s.
Space Rogue seemed to share a lot in common with the game from 1990, as this too was an RPG. Was it the same game, or a completely new game?
We know little more about the game, but ex-CEO Alex de Vries of Crystal Software had the following to say which explains why all of these titles never made it:
“I used to be the CEO of Crystal Software back when it was developing and publishing games for the C64 and Amiga platforms before making the transition to PC only. The Legend of Kyril was actually an Austrian project we signed up as a last effort to see if we could sell decent volume on the C64 if the quality was there for the title. Our involvement was purely in sales and marketing and we were never involved in the creative side of things. I wish I could remember the names of the developers but it’s just too long ago.
Code exists for some but I have moved halfway across the world since those days so I don’t know whether anything survived. I don’t have a copy anymore in any case.
We packed it in after 1996 and cancelled all projects for the C64 in Q1 1997. Titles we did (re-)publish were McRat, The Zinj Complex, Target, It’s Magic, Colorzone, Riddles and Stones and a few others. Not the greatest stuff but it was fun while it lasted.”
An interesting title which could well be crossed off the list very early as a hoax, but should be reported anyway due to its mention in Issue 19 of Commodore Format.
Space Monkeys was potentially Commodore Format’s duff April Fools entry into the magazine, just mentioned briefly as a new title coming soon, but no details about the game itself. It might just be co-incidence that the game was announced in an April issue, but it is here to be found out.
No company was around called Fosters on the C64 – most likely a reference to the Australian Lager company instead to be funny. But maybe (just maybe), some homebrew UK developer was making this game or decided there was a gap in the C64 market and money to be made.
Do you any more?… can you confirm this to be an April Fools? This is all we can currently say about a game which could well be vapourware…
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