Games That Weren't^®

Games That Weren’t has been running for a quarter of a century this year, which is not only staggering, but also a bit scary if I’m honest. For 25 years (much longer if you count preservation work before the online archive), we have been documenting and preserving as much unreleased software as we can for a variety of platforms. Though it all began with just the Commodore 64 at the start, the machine I grew up with and still play today.

When first starting out, I never quite expected this to be a project with no end in sight (which isn’t great for someone who has ‘completist‘ elements to their personality), but that is indeed exactly what Games That Weren’t is. No matter how many games we manage to save and preserve their stories, we will never capture them all, and tragically there will be many that are forever lost.

There are so many unreleased games out there, and quite often I get people get in touch and ask “Why haven’t you covered X game on the site?“, and probably always will do. Regardless of scrambling to try and cover what we can, it has been a fun and exciting 25 years of trying to do as much as possible during our free time to preserve gaming history.

To mark this milestone, I thought I’d share how everything started and gradually progressed over the years, including some of our highlights and major findings along the way. Separately I’ve done a video covering the same sort of thing in a more visual way, if you need boring monotonous ramblings to send you calmly to sleep.

As has been well documented in the past (and to death!) on our About page, it was Ian Osborne’s “That Was The Game That Wasn’t” article that first inspired interest in the area of unreleased games to a young 11 year old version of myself. I was surprised to learn that there were games being made, and sometimes even completed, which we apparently had no chance of being able to play. The fact that we supposedly couldn’t play them, made me more curious and wanting to know exactly what those games were like. Were we missing a potential classic of our time, or had we been spared for instance? Continue reading →