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.
Another game which was promised at the end of the C64’s commercial life. As games ceased up,there was news of many more games coming our way.
Solaris was one such title which was being created by C64 muscian Andrew (Drew) Rodger. Andrew was previously famous for his Terminus demo, and his wide range of music he did for companies such as Zeppelin Games. His programming ability was as good as his music abilities.
The game was simply described and mentioned once as “a heart-attack inducing single screen blaster!” in issue 47 of Commodore Format. For years we tried to get hold of Andrew, but however thanks to Andrew Fisher, we got in touch with Andrew in 2013 and find that sadly the game never really got off the ground.
Out of the 3 titles, Solaris is the title which Andrew is least familiar with – though strangely he believes he coded the most for it. It is believed to be a fixed screen blaster in the style of Galaga or Vyper on the Amiga.
The game sadly didn’t get too far, but Andrew is hoping to check his disks very soon and see if there is anything to be saved.
Check out the creator speaks section for now, but could potentially be a case closed very soon it seems!
Software House is a management game where you must manage a software house, buy in titles and sell them on for maximum profit. This particular Cult game was nothing spectacular, but well worthy of preserving anyway!
However, a GTW contributor has found http://gb64.com/game.php?id =6998 sitting in Gamebase 64, and indeed it seems to be the very game that Cult should have released. Do a comparison of the fields in the Spectrum shots, and the C64. It seems that the game was sold to Your Commodore and Cult did not release it. Or did Cult only release it in limited numbers and it has not been found yet?
Information is a bit scarce, as all we currently know is that the game was first being developed on the Amiga as a full price game, and then being converted to the C64. It was to be a Sensible Soccer style game, but this time having the ball stick to your feet (Which might have made it very easy to play)..
Contact has been made with Jim Scott, but sadly we have not heard anything back just yet. Hopefully soon we will hear back and find some information based on this game and the others.
So for now we have no credits for the game, so hopefully someone will step forward for it.
Ocean had a bucket load of titles in development at the time, and Snow Bros was one of them. This was going to be a conversion of the fairly popular arcade, which was a sort of clone of Bubble Bobble with snow.
The game promised some great graphics and sound in typical Ocean style, but it was never to be. Only a few news snippets were the existence of this game in the magazines, and no screenshots ever surfaced. Here is a CVG one below thanks to Ross Sillifant.
For years it has been pretty much rumour mill that a conversion ever took place at all, but when the Amiga and ST versions were confirmed (and Amiga version recovered), it suggested that conversions for the 8-bits could well have taken place.
In 2020, Twilight developed Andy Swann confirmed that the conversion of Snow Bros was going to be their first work for Ocean. They had the arcade board in a silver case ready to go, but at the last moment the game was swapped for Plotting instead.
Andy confirmed that as a result, no code was ever started (at least by Twilight). Had they done the game, code would have been by Stuart Cook (who did Plotting) and the Spectrum version by Jase McGann.
When asked on Twitter by @JamesPond47 if there were any concerns, Andy responded that it would have been a challenge – but would have tried their best. One player only was likely too.
It doesn’t quite close the case – as the 16-bit versions did get worked on. Was the work moved onto another team or brought in house perhaps? We’re still not sure. But certainly we now know that the conversions were in the process of being started at the very least.
It seems this one almost went under and missed the GTW scanner.
This was brought to the attention of GTW thanks to the Lemon 64 forum and a member asking about the whereabouts of the C64 version of this game.
Snoopy & Peanuts was another cartoon game by The Edge, to be in similiar shape to Garfield – The Big Fat Hairy Deal. It is possible that the game was being developed by the same team.
The fact is that the game got released on various platforms, including the 8-bits, but the C64 sadly missed out for reasons unknown. It is very unlikely that a C64 conversion was not in production, so questions need to be asked and answered.
As far as we know, there has been no adverts in the like of Zzap 64 about the game, so we have to rely on someday an advert turning up in a multiformat magazine which possibly gives us a screenshot, or even just confirmation of a C64 version being developed.
As said earlier, we assume that it would have been done by the guys behind Garfield (Softek). The only people we know who worked for Softek was Ian and Mic, so that is the first place we are trying to see if they know anything or have any leads.
The game was fairly well recieved on the platforms it was released on, though it never got the spotlight attention, which is what might make this a particularly hard game to find.. but who knows?
If anyone has more information on this title, then bung us an email!.
CP Verlag were almost always known to release high quality games, though with this game, its hard to believe that.
"Sniper" is a poor Op Wolf perspective game, where you have to snipe naff looking sprites behind poor backdrops.
I think this game could have taken a leaf out of Robocop 3’s books, and followed its method of sniping heads and things. This is nowhere near in the same class as that game, and lacks a lot of elements to make it a playable game.
Just shooting a load of heads and thats it, doesn’t really seem to event to much playability. Repetitiveness sets in quickly.
However, it must be remembered that this is a preview, though how much different the final game would be is anyone’s guess. It is likely that the game may not have changed too much apart from some new titles and music.
No credits are present in the game, so another long process for finding out more about this game and if there were a later version that we could see.
Sniping has never been so much fun… it isn’t here anyway…
We don’t know much about this game just yet. Although the game was actually finished off and fully released, we are interested in the first version which was in development. What happened to it?….. was it any good?…. Anyone got any information???
Contact has been made with Jim Scott, but sadly we have not heard anything back just yet. Hopefully soon we will hear back and find some information based on this game and the others.
So for now we have no credits for the game, so hopefully someone will step forward for it.
A more recent game which never surfaced in the end, created in 2000, Slither is a simple shooter which promised a lot of new features in the finished game.
Sadly it was never to be, and so the game remained only a simple preview, where you control a ship which avoids attack waves of fireballs.
It is not known how far the game reached before it was scrapped, though hopefully contacts will established what was going on, and what is going on now.
It seems the game may have ever reached this stage, so this is probably it. A shame, as the ideas sounded quite promising.
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.
This game was to be the sequel to Slightly Magic by Colin Jones, which Ian Gray converted from the Spectrum version. We guess that the game would have pretty much been more of the same using the same engine.
The Spectrum entry at the World of Spectrum states that the game was a finished but unreleased game, only being finished on the Amiga. It is thought that part of the Spectrum game may have been started, but this needs confirming by Colin Jones.
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.
DISCLAIMER: We are a non-profit digitisation project, aiming to digitally preserve software and history which would otherwise be lost for good. If for any reason there is anything that you do not wish to be on the website, please contact us for removal.
Games That Weren't® is the registered trademark of Frank Gasking.
