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.

Latest News and Posts

Messiah 3

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: , last updated: by Frank Gasking

Mad Men Software were set to release the fully completed game Messiah 3. This game was a RPG covering six disk sides and was to have a large manual due to the size of the game.
Gene Barker programmed the game and the game was confirmed as finished.

The game was mentioned in various magazines such as Commodore World Issue #3 (Page 8) and RUN Magazine Sep/Oct 1992 (Page 13). The articles can be found above in the articles link.

Apparently the game was not sold because of the game manual and problems with reproduction of it. A little bit of sad tale for such a massive game.

Jazzcat got hold of Gene Barker with the conversation going as follows:

GTW: I remember years ago when Mad Men Software released the compression kit, which was a dev tool for Messiah 3 and I also remember it being intended as a 5 part series. From memory the production stopped even though the game was completed because of the reproduction costs of the accompanying manual. Does that sound right?

Gene Barker: That was part of it, the bottom line was that the 64 market dropped out from underneath us before we completed the project. The industry transitioned to console development and back then, only big shops could afford the development kits, leaving us out-of-luck. In recent years, we have danced-around the idea of adapting M3 to a mobile platform.

For fun, I’ll see if we can send a few screenshots your way to spice-up your page. Plus send you a list of people involved – I was only one part of a dedicated development team. This will take a little homework on my part.

‘Am impressed with the care you take in your research. ‘Have fun,

Gene.

PS: Regarding the manual – That was our write-protection. All the game’s text / interaction with NPC’s was contained in this manual. We liked this, because it gave us the freedom to write a rich story, was far easier on your eyes, and didn’t burden you with disk / hardware based write-protection.”

Work is underway to try and get remains of the game. We need to try and preserve such a complete title, so the search begins!…

Can you help?

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 5 Comments

Memo

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Memo is a simple, but effect pairs clone for two players which was being produced back in 1992 by Antic Productions.

It was hoped that maybe the game could be sold by one of the remaining publishers at the time, but sadly the developers lost interest in the game and decided to can it.

Göran Johansson had the following to say about the game:

"The object was like MEMORY but here you have two players and the object is to STEAL pairs from the opponent. We didn’t have the will to make this game come true."

Göran very kindly dug out the remains of the game to release to the world and preserve fully. So here it is! It is nothing spectacular out of all the pairs games out there, but it is well presented and the two player feature is a nice feature for the game.

Ian Coog from HVSC also notes that the game uses /MUSICIANS/M/Moon/Memory_Tune3.sid, but also there are several other tunes in the directory that were meant for the game but never used… Memory_Preview_worktune.sid, Memory_Tune_1.sid and Memory_Tune_2.sid. We will get these added very soon to the archive download.

It is certainly worth a look and great to see it preserved.

Case closed!

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McRat 2

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: , last updated: by Frank Gasking

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.

This game was to be the sequel to the released McRat game, which gathered average reviews upon its release and got reviewed in Commodore Format.

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.”

Do you know any more about this game?…

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Mega Brain

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Another puzzler, and this time a memory game, where you must remember a sequence of picture tiles and try to pick them out.

Not that exciting a concept, and one of the many puzzlers that swept the C64’s shores in the late 90’s.

Graphically the game is very good, and plays well with some good sonics, but its not that original and lacks a bit to keep interest levels high.

The preview indicates that the game seems to have reached a late stage before being scrapped. It seems all there, and probably only needed some minor adjustments to finish off.

There are some credits to follow up, which will hopefully establish more on this little puzzle game.

Nice, but a little boring…

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Mayhem Deluxe

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Any C64 user will know who and what Mayhem is. Rated as one of the best games ever made (Although contested by some people), Mayhem was planning a comeback briefly in a new outing called "Mayhem Deluxe".

The Apex boys talked about plans to bring up an updated version of Mayhem, complete with new levels, new enemies, remixed levels, new tunes, minor improvements and maybe even a level editor. This was all depending on how good the sales of the first game were.

Although sales of the game were very good, it seems Mayhem Deluxe was merely an idea which lost its way. It was a good idea, but after all the sales of Mayhem, it looked like the C64 was dying out and the Apex boys had to move on… and so they did. Mayhem did surface on the Mobile phones recently in ‘Mayhem’s Magic Dust’, but the C64 sequel was sadly never to be… and never will be for that matter…. ah well…

It is not known yet if anything was ever started on a sequel, though its highly unlikely that it ever was. We will be asking questions soon, so hopefully we can either close the case or have a case to chase… we shall see.

Case closed for now…

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Mattie Goes Mining

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: , last updated: by Frank Gasking

This is a surprising title which hasn’t really been discussed as a missing Matthew Smith game, and really it isn’t much to do with Matthew apart from improving one of his games on the Commodore 64 and was most likely a bit of a dig at Matthew Smith when he went to Software Projects and took Manic Miner with him.

The idea apparently was for this title was to improve upon the C64 version of Manic Miner. This may have included the use of multi-colour graphics and other graphical and sonic improvements.

According to a news article about the title, the game was at an “advanced state of development” at the time of them writing. There were stated to also be “many improvements” to the original game to take advantage of the C64 infrastructure over the ZX Spectrum.

Additionally (thanks to Andrew Nicklin!) in PC Games 1984, the following news snippet was given:

“Bug-byte hope to have a replacement for Manic Miner in the shops by early spring. The program, to be called Matty Goes Mining, will be a multi-level game for the Commodore 64.

Nasty things will happen to Cabbage Patch Dolls and many well-known figures in the computer industry will be lampooned. The program is written by Wayne Quinn, who is not a Hollywood cowboy star but a 16-year-old Liverpudlian.”

So at last we get a credit confirmation, and its the developer!…. Now how far did it get?

This was all that was ever heard of the game, and it never surfaced anywhere. Certainly if it was at an advanced state, then we’d like to see and find out what happened to it. Matthew was quizzed on this title and didn’t know anything about it unsurprisingly, but we now have a coder link.

In November 2021, a friend of Wayne – Chris Griffin, shed more light on this game and what actually happened. The title was originally started as a conversion of Manic Miner for the C64. When Matthew Smith got out of contract with Bug Byte, Wayne recoded the game to ‘Matty Goes Mining’, but it was never finished before Bug Byte collapsed.

The news article was incorrect, and Wayne was not a Liverpudlian. He was born in Wiltshire and moved up to Ellesmere Port when he was about 3 years old. Wayne and Chris were best friends, and Chris would help Wayne with conversion of the graphics. They were never sent the originals, so he and Wayne had to painstakingly redraw everything using 8×8 graph paper. Wayne used Zeus assembler to program the game, and the C64 and disk drive was given to him to use from Bug Byte.

Sadly Wayne passed away 3 years ago, so we will never get to hear his thoughts about the development or potentially see anything of his conversion and extended game. We thank Chris though for sharing with us the story about the game’s development and his memories.

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 5 Comments

Matrix

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Ah nooooo…. not another puzzler!… The 10,000th puzzler i’ve had to go through for GTW, i’m sure!

It’s also another game that came with no instructions, so i’m not sure what you have to do. After some fiddling around with the game, I was only able to produce some strange shapes on the screen.

Apparently being created by Double Density, who produced some great little C64 games for the German market, this one has the graphical polish of their games, and their typical style.

This seems to be an early preview, as there are no titles or anything apart from the actual game itself, which doesn’t seem to be very playable.

No credits are present, so another game that should take some work to find out more about.

Puzzling pleasure at its most puzzling…

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Math Tutor

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: , last updated: by Frank Gasking

A quick entry, but this educational game was advertised early in 1984 in a few magazines as a list of games coming soon from Comm*Data / Channel Software.

This title has been missing for so many years, but Allan Pinkerton has managed to help us find the game in 2015, and so here it is!

Released in very limited numbers it seems, but released none the less!

Case closed!

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Math Farm

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Thanks to Peter Weighill for the heads up for our next title. Math Farm is a US based educational game which was described in its Nanosec advert (and this second advert) as follows:

"This exciting educational game features vivid, colourful screens that support any child’s imagination. Teaches multiplication, division, addition and subtraction using large, easy to read numbers, linked with object and relational techniques. Hi-res color graphics and sound are supported and optimized by the use of speech synthesis. Speech is program supported and no additional hardware is necessary. Now learning is fun… now the computer talks to your child."

Overall from the screenshots, this looked like quite a good educational game for 1984.

But what happened to the game?… Well, two other Nanosec games did seem to make it, but this and Ground Zero seem to have got lost somewhere in time.

Did Nanosec go under just before those two games could get released? We are not sure, but luckily we have some developer names attached and hopefully we will find out more soon.

Could it just be that this is a very obscure game yet to be fully preserved? Do you have it in your collection?

More soon on this one we hope!

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Math-a-graph

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Math-a-graph is a game by the creator of Coined and was a Mario Picross clone that wasn’t quite finished. Basically the game was almost finished, and is a very playable game at the moment and also has a level editor.

Nico however is not a graphician and the development stopped as he could not find someone who wanted to do some graphics. As a result the game will likely never be finished.

Recently Nico has compiled like promised, a preview version of what he had and has released it onto CSDB and allowed us to place the preview here. He has also requested for graphic artists and musicians who would be interested in contributing to the game to finally finish it off for good! Great news!

For now, check out the 5 level preview which has been released and enjoy this wonderful Picross clone! :-)

More soon we hope…

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