Preserving Cancelled & Unreleased Video Game History Since 1999
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.
The source of this next entry is interesting as it was mentioned in "Illegal" pirate fanzine as something seen at PC 1988 show (or so it seems) by SSD of Cosmos.
At present we know very little about the game and there seems to be no information on the web about it.
How far did this get?…
This is one of the strangest games i’ve seen on a C64, mainly because of its originality of having a 2D sprite as the main character, and 3D vectors as the enemies.
Pro-Does features different vector shapes which have to be blasted away quickly, without touching you first, and all within a time limit.
It’s strange looking, and slightly impressive at first, but then the excitement quickly wears off and you are left with a simple shooter, with some flash bits of code to cover it up.
Gaz Spence recently in 2016 found that the game was an ending part to the demo Triiod 3, so it seems this was never intended to be a full game – but just part of the demo.
Case closed!
Will Wright, creator of Sim City and The Sims, started his career
on the C64 with Raid on Bungeling Bay. (There is one theory that he got the idea for Sim City from creating the maps for RoBB.)
According to his mobygames summary, he worked on an unfinished C64 game called Probots. The sad thing is he no longer has any copies of the game, and would like to remake it…
Reference: http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,4217
Retro Gamer approached Will for an interview for an article Andrew Fisher is developing, but Will was too busy to answer the questions… which is a shame, because one of them was fishing for details on Probots…
Sadly as a result it could be hard to get much more background about this particular game, and finding it could be very tough. But what exactly happened to the game? Did it get mislaid, or lost in a fire or something?
We hope to find out in the near future, but for now we’ll have to use our imaginations to wonder what this could have been…
A strategy/action game originally for the Amiga which was also being worked on for the C64.
It has been told that the game was supposed to be programmed for the danish company "Interactivition", rumour is that they acted very unprofessional (not responding to phonecalls and such) and eventually the game’s programmer quit. The Amiga version never got completed (the programmer was "Kenneth Bernholm").
The preview features some early graphics and no sound.
This is all of Private Property, an exclusive GTW addition which allows you to prepare for battle and place weapons onto a map. Don’t start the game, otherwise it will crash.
An early glimpse at a game never complete…
Confirmed – finally! …. but Domark were indeed working on a C64 conversion of Prince of Persia. Who confirmed it?… Chris West. Who is now hoping to recover a copy to show to the world and said the following on Lemon 64:
“This looks fantastic, better than the version we did at Domark way back when. I had a version of this on my disks somewhere. I did just buy a 1541 to USB gadget so maybe it will show up if the disks are still readable and even the very nearly finished C64 version of Typhoon Thompson as well. Well done with a fab looking C64 game. ”
Chris by chance had seen the announcement of the C64 version release by MrSid and then stated how it was far far better than the version they were doing.
Domark’s version was to be made to run on a stock C64, but we believe that it was a target for the C64 GS.
In total there have been 3 attempts on converting Prince of Persia – one unofficial and two official. Including this entry, you can read about all 3 within GTW64. However, in late 2011 – Mr Sid completed an impressive unofficial conversion of the game in Easy Flash format which you can checkout here: http://www.rgcd.co.uk/2011/10/prince-of-persia-c64.html
When speaking again with Chris in 2023, he suggested that actually the game had only got to a stage with his brother Tony doing some graphics. It suggests that if there was any code, there may not have been much at all.
It is true that Prince Of Persia was to have an official conversion onto the C64 by none other than E&E, the creators of Lemmings on the C64.
Although quite late into the C64’s life, Prince Of Persia was to be developed for Domark, but sadly it was all too late and the C64 was dying fast.
According to Remi Ebus, the head of E&E, only possibly the main character sprites were ever done. Nothing more than that ever really happened before the title was scrapped.
If the Sprites were to be found, then that would certainly be something, and Remi has not ruled out the possibility of anything turning up of the game. So we may see a glimpse of what could of been sometime in the future we hope.
Just how well this conversion would have fared is but a mere guess. With a solid conversion of Lemmings, it seemed that E&E could do anything, so we may have missed another stunning conversion sadly.
In total there have been 3 attempts on converting Prince of Persia – one unofficial and two official. Including this entry, you can read about all 3 within GTW64. However, in late 2011 – Mr Sid completed an impressive unofficial conversion of the game in Easy Flash format which you can checkout here: http://www.rgcd.co.uk/2011/10/prince-of-persia-c64.html
More Pauper than a Prince… Case sadly closed…
Another GTW from Channel 8 Software, this game presumably followed a similar pattern to other GTWs, ‘Gotcha’ Maths and Toddler Tutor, essentially being educational games for young children.
There isn’t any more information on these games sadly, they have entries on GB64 but with scant information and obviously for unreleased games, no downloads or screenshots available.
However, a copy did surface recently on Ebay, but all attempts to contact the person who purchased the game have failed. The buyer was Bokvamme, which means that the game will be preserved soon.
Click here for a photo of the game and tape.
Allan Pinkerton kindly preserved a disk copy of the game which you can now find here as a download.
It means it is no longer a GTW, and one we can close the case on! The game was actually released also in the US by Comm*Data, so it is very much a case closed!
Designed by another best-selling science fiction author, Walter Jon Williams, Pride and Prejudice was billed as a game of 19th century romance and today is possibly the most sought after game from the Berserker Works stable. Apparently it was released, but we have not seen anything of the game apart from the adverts you can see here.
The game was for up to six players, with each one playing a poor but virtuous maiden from the Regency period. You have one season in the ‘London season’ to attract a bachelor and get engaged, with the most eligible naturally being Mr. Darcy. It was aimed at a female market, which obviously existed only in the smallest of numbers back in the 1980s, but according to Walter Jon Williams himself; the most ruthless players were men!
It could well be that we can eventually remove this game.. but for now this is at large and we need to try and find it!
Can you help us?…
Priceless scrolls was being sold as a "A Scripture Treasure Hunt Game Based on Biblical Principles" in a 1992 issue of RUN magazine from the US. The game was sold on disk, but it seems that this is one that either didn’t sell that well or never got fully released.
There were to be 255 rooms to search and 255 scrolls of scripture to find.
At present nothing of the game seems to have been preserved, so we are not sure if this is game that never got fully released or if it is just not backed up yet.
Can you help at all?
An interesting title brought to my attention from a reader of Atariage.com, Avram Dumitrescu.
This is a kind of frogger clone which was developed for Adventure International by a guy called Russ Wetmore. A review of the released Atari game gives this rough description…
"In Preppie you control prepster, where your job is to recover wayward golf balls that have been hit into the rough. Along the way, you must avoid speeding golf carts, bulldozers, lawn mowers and gigantic frogs in your quest. You must also leap canoes, logs and gators in order to negotiate the water hazard.
Completion of a screen results in a more difficult setting, which must be negotiated at a faster pace. Don’t even graze an ankle — you’ll end up flat as a pancake underneath an adversary. A clock at the top of the screen ticks off the precious seconds. Unless you retrieve the balls on a screen before the clock winds down, you will automatically lose a life.
Preppie is addictive, humorous and maddening all at the same time — an unbeatable arcade combination."
It seems like a very good conversion then. So what happened to the C64 version?
Russ had the following to say: "Preppie! was rewritten for the C64 by some developers that hung me out to dry and never delivered the final product. To be fair, the C64 graphics architecture made a straight port nearly impossible."
So sadly it might be slightly tough trying to locate anything of this game, but hopefully Russ might soon be able to point us in the right direction. Time will tell!…
More soon we hope…
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