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.
Super Pac Twins was hyped up in the pages of the later issues of Commodore Format, even featuring as a Diary Of A Game.
The classic Pacman concept was to be taken and updated with more sophisticated mazes and a two player mode.
The game was shaping up well, and Paul was getting there, when something quite bad happened. Commodore Format was going downhill, and was being ran by Simon Forrester, who put the demo on the powerpack without Paul’s permission (Paul had even written on the CD, “Not For Powerpack!” on it!
Paul was quite upset about this, and halted work on the game. Simon Forrester even slightly insulted the game, and invited readers of the magazine to send in their game ideas to improve on the game. Of course, this was just before CF’s demise, so I don’t know if anyone entered it.
Anyway, the game was shelved and the preview is pretty much all of what existed. However, recently, Richard Bayliss gained rights to take over the project and completed it, releasing it to the world for free, which we have now added to the download for posterity.
As to what Paul would have done and had as the final game is all but a dream now. A sad end to a promising little title, but some compenstation with the fact that Richard Bayliss finished off the game.
Interestingly though, the game concept was picked up by Paul again after about 6 months and turned into Twin Balls, which also didn’t get a release. Here you can also read Paul’s story about how SP was turned into the game and what happened.
Classic concept, almost making a fresh start… case closed…
Not an official licence of the game, at least, especially not in 1999! :)
One of the scener’s, Patrick Furlong, started the unofficial game back in 1999/2000 and designed everything which would be in the game.
Set out as a genre mix of Zak McKracken and Maniac Mansion, the game certainly sounded quite promising.
After finding a C64 group who were interested in doing the game for Patrick, contact was eventually lost and it was never known just how much of the game got started, if any at all.
All that seems to remain is a design for the game, which hopefully Patrick may allow us to upload one day.
Quite possibly this is a game too big for some designers, but who knows… Maybe Protovision would be interested :)
In 1987 Bob Stevenson and Doug Hare of Kinetic Designs were working on a mysterious project. According to rumours, there are a number of games that they never got finished.
"Starline" was the working name for a horizontal shoot’em-up that Doug and Bob were were working on for Thalamus.
The game was based on a very cool but "ultimately unworkable" bitmap scroller and featured really cool looking graphics by Bob Stevenson.
Sadly due to the problems its features entailed, the game and its technology was abandoned and the game ultimately morphed into IO for Firebird.
All that was ever created, was a preview of the game’s scroller and level map, and another preview with actual sprite and scoreboard infos. The game was never finished.
Originally after some initial contact, Doug Hare confirmed details, but sadly did not have the previews which once existed.
However, regular of GTW, Jason Kelk had a mysterious demo within his disk collection, featuring very Bob’esq graphics on a neat bitmap scroll. It wasn’t until a search of the code recently revealed that the game was none other than "Starline – the trailer" from Kinetic Designs in 1987. The trailer features the first level design scrolling through rather impressively. There are no enemies or anything to do but admire the technique and the graphics.
Doug, pleased to see his game once more, was kind enough to give some words about his game. So get the chance to read the story of Starline, straight from the creator himself in "Creator Speaks".
So what now?… Doug has confirmed that a later version was created with some sprites, so GTW still yet has to find this later preview to bring this wonderful looking title case to a close. If the trailer could sit on someone’s disk collection, then maybe the later preview also does…
Fantastic looking glimpse of a potentially fantastic game…
The sequel to one of the biggest 16-bit vector games was started on the C64 way back in 1989, trying to improve on the original version.
Way back in August 1988, the 16-bit versions were reviewed. In the interview with Jez San that followed, he says:
“In the end we found some good Commodore 64 programmers and they are going to be working with us. We’re going to supply our routines and lots of help, and they’re going to be programming the 6502 everyone in our company is a 16-bit programmer, no-one wanted to go back to 8-bit.”
Additionally worthy of note, but the Spectrum version actually surfaced… so no doubt this was no impossible conversion.
An official conversion in the making, which seems to be what we have here. Similar to Mercenary, but nowhere near as good, the game was scrapped due to speed issues, a shame as it was starting to develop nicely and take shape. With the preview which has been out there for a while, you can actually leave the planet, and go into ‘Elite’ mode and hunt around. Quite an impressive preview, it’s not known how complete this preview actually is – though it actually seems to be we believe practically the complete game.
Recently in 2009, we had an email from Pete Baron who said that this was his game!…. Whilst working on Myth, Pete was offered to do the C64 conversion. In total, 6 months was spent on actual coding whilst doing Myth, and Pete spent a lot of time trying to get up on the 3D side of things on the C64. He had never done any 3D work on the C64 before, but had been promised by Jez Sans to get any resources possible from their team to help. He had some info, but had to do a lot of working out himself. He managed to get some routines and got to work. A bit through the project, Pete demonstrated things to Jez who felt the game was far too slow. Pete then tried to improve things, and did manage to… but then Space Rogue happened…
Space Rogue featured solid filled vectors on the C64 and was very very fast for a 0.98mhz machine. It blew Pete’s work out of the water and Jez had seen it too. They now had to try and match Space Rogue, so Pete now had the impossible mission of getting a solid version working. He did just that, but the frame rate was just too poor filled in. In the end, the project was canned and no more. (You can read more detail from Pete in the Creator Speaks section)
Just how the game sneaked out in its current form is unknown, but the fantastic news was that Pete did actually do a complete conversion of the game in the end that never got released, and in two flavours… the wireframe edition, and potentially a filled vector version too.
Pete in late 2010 dug out all the remains he had of Starglider 2, which was believed to be the very last build of the game. Jani Tahvanainen very kindly spent a lot of time digging through and reconstructing the game. Unfortunately though it seems that once compiled, that even though the date suggests it was a last build – the preview seems far more complete in comparison.
The version salvaged does not feature a complete game panel area, and starts with a test screen with Pete’s name mentioned and a date of 1988. You can use the F1 key to start moving around, and going into space just gives you a black screen. Unfortunately although the Solid 3D flags were present in the source code, the actual implementation doesn’t seem to be present.
It is believed that an additional block of work was done to get the panels in and starfields, and the solid 3D work was completed. It seems very much so that the preview which we already had may well be a build from the very final version of the source code. Just sadly we won’t be able to unlock the solid 3D version without the source. As a result, this could be a complete version of Starglider 2, though it may need playing through to clarify.
However, as well as getting a build of the game which has elements not in the preview, a long lost piece of work by Bob Stevenson has been salvaged, and would have been the game’s loading screen. Also Pete has very kindly allowed us to release the source code that was recovered, which you can now download to check out for yourself. There are two versions, Pete’s original supplied source code, and a tweaked/fixed up version by Jani.
So we have to now close the case for this one (Unless the supplier of the old preview to GP has the sources?), as what Pete recovered was all that Pete had and could still be read from disk. Every physical piece of media was dumped after digitally preserving what could be preserved, and before Pete left the UK to travel the world.
Have an explore around and see what you can uncover. Maybe there is more to the old “preview” than we all first thought?
Space exploration going a step further on the C64… Case closed!
Designed as the sequel to the highly thought of Star Fleet, Star Fleet II was aimed at being bigger, better and more complex than its already complex predecessor. Both were war simulation games where you controlled ships and armies, in the first game with the aim of defending Earth from aliens and in Star Fleet II you played as the aliens, intent of conquering planets throughout the universe.
However the making of the game was fraught with difficulty as the complexity of the game overawed the programmers, who struggled with the game until an eventual release in 1989 that was peppered with so many bugs and faults as to render the game almost unplayable. Although updated versions were released that solved many of the problems, according to designer Mark Baldwin, the brand name of Star Fleet was so damaged by this time as to make a port to other systems pointless.
Another major problem at the time involved legal wrangling within the company making the game, Interstel, which was an affiliate label with Electronic Arts. The original designer of the Star Fleet games, Trevor Sorensen, was deposed as president of Interstel while on holiday in Europe, meaning he spent the next few years involved in legal battles with the board members who had taken over. Despite winning the legal battles Interstel folded in 1992 and with it any chance of Star Fleet II being ported to other systems or another sequel being made for the PC.
Nevertheless, a programmer called Brett Keeton, who Sorensen describes as the greatest programmer he ever worked with, was making a C64 port at one point. Despite his best efforts the game was simply too large for a feasible port to be made, with the entire memory of the C64 filled yet the surface barely scratched on the game. There was another person working on an Amiga port, which may have had the capacity to run the game, but problems within Interstel meant that this too was never finished. According to Sorensen, an Atari ST version was actually closer to completion at the time the ports were pulled than the Amiga version.
Tragically, Brett Keeton passed away in 2002 so there is no chance of ever seeing what the C64 version of Star Fleet II would have looked like. He also possessed the only copy of the source code for a deluxe version of Star Fleet he was working on with Trevor Sorensen and another programmer called Mark Hartman. We may be able to find out more from Sorensen’s notes, which he has said he will look for. Perhaps they are our last chance for more information on the unfinished games.
The story of Star Fleet seems littered with tragedy and setbacks, but Sorensen is still hopeful of some day releasing a deluxe version of Star Fleet and the spin-off Star Legions. Judging from the high regard Star Fleet is still held in by gamers worldwide I think that support for this project would be considerable. You can read Mark Baldwin’s and Trevor Sorensen’s comments in the ‘Creator Speaks’ section. They explain what happened far better than I ever could.
A game which was to be a mixture between "Elite", "Ultima", "Pirates" and "Space Rogue".
When Mr Lee lost a bit his inspiration he also started coding on a game, what he described as a ‘little game’. This was "Colonial Trader", which appeared to be the 2D Version of the 3D "Starblast".
Motivation for the Starblast project was low after trouble with "Colonial Trader".
Some things were already finished for the game, like the code for the intro, the opening and the storypart, some Editors and 3D Routines (which later were partly used in demos).
Also ready was the flying sequence, what meant you could fly around in space (with a 3D Starfield) and shoot (see screenshots), although there is nothing to shoot at.
There was a FLI-title screen (unfortunately lost), the spacestations screen, gouverners-graphics (about 20 of ’em or more) and also some 3D animations for the Spacestation (see screenshots), done in this early state with Giga-CAD 8Mhz, later on PC/SGI.
The actual storypart was released as a preview. The fact that some lamers were "cracking" an unprotected gameintro and equipping it with a very ugly and lame crackerintro, made the creators sure not to continue on this project.
So sadly the game screens you can see are exclusive to GTW from what I know, and may be all what you will see of this game…. Hopefully one day soon, Zeldin will allow us to upload what is left of this cool game for the archives.
The early 90’s were a good time for gamers like myself growing up with the C64. I just about caught the tail end of the C64’s game market in the UK as a 9 yr old and was privileged to still be able to buy up Codemasters, Hit Squad and Encore budget titles with my pocket money. Around the time, I discovered CJ’s Elephant Antics and Spike In Transylvania, which were two of my favorite C64 games of the time.
Both games were created by the talented trio of David Clarke, Jonathan Temples (originally Smyth) and Ashley Hogg for Codemasters under their Genesis Software development label. All of their games came with some great quality visuals, excellent sound and heavily console’esq playability and feeling throughout.
Around the same time, Genesis got involved with Zzap 64 and provided them with some music demos (showcasing Ashley’s talents) to fill up their Mega-tape cover mount. It was a good promotion for the team. However, further to promoting Ashley’s talents, they decided to also pass on a preview of a game that has since become one of the titles on the C64 which many wished was actually completed.
Spellcast was the game, and the preview was to demonstrate a great little hack and jump game – not too dissimilar to classic NES titles like Castlevania with its look and feel. The game was to be Genesis Software’s first development as a group, with David as the lead and sole programmer (having recently left Choice Software).
“The game was started because David and I were fans of Ghost ‘n’ Goblins and Barbarian. We had not written any published games yet – David’s programming was starting to take off and so we went into it.”, Jon recalled.
Went into it they certainly did. Even in with a single developed level and demonstration, Genesis Software didn’t hold back to showcase their talents. Their demo came with full titles, high-score board and music with sampled sounds – it was very well polished.
The demo was also to be a showcase of some neat game features – with large fire breathing dragons, irritated wasps, floating log platforms and skull throwing creatures – most characters made up of multiple sprites. The main character was full of life with a wide variety of moves, and there were many neat little touches throughout – clearly this was a game the developers enjoyed creating.
“David and I loved the game and tried to put as many moves and options into it. The player, hacks, jumps, and uses of objects etc.”, reflected Jon.
Once the first level was practically complete – Genesis felt that they were onto a winner, with a game that would feature a lot of elements that the developers felt C64 games were lacking at the time. It was becoming clear though that this could no longer be the desired single load, and things switched very quickly over to multi-load. However, after touting the preview round to some of the key publishers of the time – the response was very surprising. “We tried to sell it to people but got no responses.”, Jon informs us.
As a result of no take up for the game, Genesis cut their losses and polished up the 1 level preview for Zzap, which was published on Issue 74’s covermount, Mega tape 18. No doubt as a clever way of showing what they were capable of. After their somewhat surprising rejection – undeterred, Genesis Software tried again by taking remains of David’s aborted New Zealand Story conversion for Ocean and creating what we now know as CJ’s Elephant Antics. The rest was history – Genesis Software getting their breakthrough and going onto develop some superb C64 titles.
But after experiencing Spellcast on Zzap’s covermount, many asked the question to why the game was never picked up by anyone. It’s not only a mystery to us, but is most likely still also to the guys from Genesis Software. A gaming opportunity missed surely?
Had the game have been picked up, what would a full and complete Spellcast have been like you may ask? The eagle eyed among you may well have caught the title screen clues, of which Jon sheds some light upon…
“The levels were meant to progress in the manner of the title screen. The title screen has the Spellcast name, but below is a black outline of a forest leading to a castle on the hill. Well the first level was the forest. Next was the swamp. Then the town leading to the castle.”. The Ghost n Goblins inspiration now very clear and evident.
Although believed that 1 level was all that ever existed, speculation suggested there was more. Both Jon and Ashley however confirmed that one level was all that ever was. Jon suggests that at best, there may be some extra sprites or bits of backgrounds intended for later levels – but unlikely. However, digging around in the preview itself resulted in finding assets which never got used – such as a 2 sprite skeleton creature.
Poking around in the game map actually causes the skeletons to come out of the ground, suggesting that either level 1 was larger at one point – or part of level 2 may have been started to a point. Another interesting “feature” (as David called it on a YouTube video posting of the preview), was where you could control the logs with a joystick in port 1, allowing your character to float over the entire level.
As you well may have spotted – Jon and Ashley have given plenty regarding the story of Spellcast, but David has sadly remained elusive – choosing not to speak as of yet, even after several contact attempts. It is hoped that he may some day change his mind and give an insight and different perspective about Spellcast. For now, all that can be done is to reflect on what could have been.
If for any reason you have never experienced Spellcast before, then load it up and take a look at a game which should have been finished and released. The game publishers of the time have a lot to answer for…
Not the most original game here… a blatant clone of the classic "Star Paws", where you control a space man who has to protect his crop of vegetables from a mass of alien lifeform.
No space turkeys to chase, but plenty of action and some vastly superior graphics than the Software Projects original.
Now this game was quite a mystery really. It first really popped up on a special Commodore Scene free games disk, with no details about it at all. The only distinguishable thing about the game and its existance, is the Adam Gilmore music, which is a dead giveaway (The style is easy to match to him).
Searching through the game’s code actually reveils from the music credits, that this was for Microvalue, which was Flair’s budget label at the time.
So what happened?… this game never was heard of back in the days of Zzap and Commodore Format, and no-one can own up to owning an original. The game itself does not even have any credits or linkage to Microvalue in anyway.
This game has been sneaked out, after not being released for unknown reasons. We recently found out that the game was to be published as a favour to Peter Johnson from Colin Courtney, so that he would produce other games for them. David Mowbray produced all the graphics after being asked for a favour by Colin to do so.
After David completed the graphics and sent them back, that was the last he heard. (Read Creator Speaks for more)
It seems maybe it was a little too late for Flair to release the game, maybe the C64 scene was starting to fade too much. Well, it has been found that the game was indeed released, but in a very very limited form! Andreas has kindly contributed a scan of a compilation box which Microvalue released towards the end of its life. This contains the Space Vegetables Corp game, and is where probably the game was sneaked out from.
It seems that the compilation was done just before Microvalue left the C64 market, and sold the compilation to get a small bit of money back. As a result, the game never got a proper full release.. and is very rare to find. Check out the scans which Andreas has kindly sent in, and a port of the archive disk.
The game isn’t actually that bad, and it can’t be for the reason that its a poor game, because it isn’t.
A rather interesting entry for an unofficial conversion of Space Ace for the C64. Not the same as the planned version being done by Empire Software in 1990-91, but a version way back in 1987/88 by Gregg Kustudic and his friend Scott.
The developers were so disappointed by the Dragons Lair conversion that was done by Software Projects, that they decided to have a go at doing Space Ace and show how a Laserdisc could be converted successfully to the humble C64.
They produced the first level from a possible 15, after borrowing a Space Ace cab and carefully replicating the various parts of the level. According to the developers it was very faithful, and of which can be seen partly from the screenshots.
They showed and pitched it to Electronic Arts, but they were not interested and rejected it. However, a year later and EA were releasing their own conversion of Space Ace on the likes of the Amiga.
It seems that Gregg then decided to call it a day and the C64 conversion was canned. However in recently years Gregg got a web presence and added up a page with the work on the game and various screenshots – which seemed to suggest that the conversion still existed and was still runnable.
In 2009, GTW got hold of Gregg and he very kindly offered to post us a copy of the final remains of the game. He did this, and GTW is very proud to present what Gregg and Scott produced, which is a rather nice conversion!
It is a little rough around the edges, but it shows just how well a C64 conversion could have shaped up. It reminds me a lot of the work of Paul Norman, and works very well. It’s a shame that Electronic Arts didn’t sign up the guys to finish it off! The preview happens a bit fast, so we recommend you read the instructions. Please note that the disk original version is NTSC based, so use the patched version instead if you are PAL based!
In February 2022, PatmanQC created a video on the history of Space Ace, which talks about the C64 edition. You can check out the video here:
Salvaged and preserved … a taste of what could have been. Case closed!…
Soldier Of Light was not a particularly memorable conversion of the arcade game from ACE software back in the mid to late 80’s. However, the weak result was found to be possibly down to this very version which sits in GTW…
Carl Coffey was the coder of this game, and produced a very well presented demo featuring the main character and some cut scenes. The main character moved, but that was it. There was no scrolling or anything playable. A screenshot of this demo was published in Commodore User magazine, so we know that this was originally to be the official conversion.
Although the game looks better than the completed effort, it is unfair to compare, as this isn’t really playable!… Plus with the cancellation of this version, the new team that had to take over were left with far less time to get a quality product out. More time seems to have been spent on graphics in this preview.
Rob Whitaker has kindly put his story across about the completed version, after it was found that this review originally unfairly took digs at the completed version, and wished more of this particular version. Considering the time limits they had, Rob’s team did wonders to get something out like they did. No doubt had the guys had the full development time, things may have been more successful. Reading Creator Speaks will explain more in Rob’s own words.
So what happened to version 1?… Well, we don’t know, and neither does Rob.
Darren Melbourne recently particially solved the mystery, by mentioning…
"Carl actually walked away from the project after The Edge software company never honoured any of it’s payment schedules. Carl was a good coder and an exceptional artist, who could have created an excellent conversion of SOL, if he had been paid. Carl created many C64 games which didn’t see the light of day, with Hobey Joe (the story of a winged Gryphon type creature) being outstanding for it’s 1984 dateline. As far as I know Carl left the industry disullusioned by the poeple who ran publishing companies."
So sadly it was nothing to do with Carl not being able to do the conversion, but non-payment. How would Carl’s version have shaped up? Did Carl do more than this demo?… Was anything actually playable? Just how far Carl got before he left is unknown. Contact is needed with Carl to find out more, and even see how much more was done. Quite possibly Level 1 could exist in a more fuller form at the very least. It will be interesting to find out and see.
So for now we are left to ponder what could have been, though when compared with the prototype previews of R-Type, there is not much to ponder, as there simply isn’t enough evidence.
Faithful to the eye, but covering up not a great deal…
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