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.
A very quick entry, mainly as we don’t have much on it just yet. But Jason Kelk flags up to GTW that a 3rd Mastertronic Loader game was created but unused.
Apparently Chris Young, who was on work experience at Mastertronic at the time, said that the game got messed up at the mastering factory and as a result was never used. When we asked Richard Aplin about the game, he couldn’t recall anything about it. And the reason why, was because it was done by a different developer.
The long lost 3rd loader was to be “Munch Load”, which was produced by John N.W Cheeseman (or John Cheesman). Munch Load was actually a game which was written to go along with a new loader called “Cheeseloader”. It’s a simple game as you might expect, but very playable and would have been enjoyed for sure by tape gamers.
The game itself got leaked however in 1994 through dodgy means, which can be read about in the note files in the download here. It’s an interesting story, but essentially the game was leaked from a demo disk that was sent to Ocean by John. Leaked by similar means then to how Plotting was leaked.
In 2016, a proper version of the game and fully fixed was released by Hokuto Force, which you can download from here thanks to those guys. Cheeseload seems to be very much at large at the moment, but is probably outside of our remit to search for :)
Hopefully some day we may hear more from John himself about the loader and the game. But for now, check it out and the interesting back story!
I’ve seen some funny sick games on the C64, the recent releases of Blood 1 and 2 are two of them. Massacre was another game attempting to push the boundaries of sickness.
Simply you have a target, and you are mean’t to massacre all the soldiers which walk across the battlefield.
That is it in this preview, there is one very simple screen with some simple characters that get shot down.
There isn’t much therefore offered in this preview so far, and its not known how much further the game got before being scrapped. No full game has ever been seen.
Credits are also unknown for this game, so its guessing as where to start searching for information on this game.
A rarity this one… actually seeing Mario on the home computers. Released on PC and other formats, this was no action adventure like the games we all know, but a kids adventure title which you’d most likely find in a school or something.
Commodore Power magazine had the following to say upon news of its conversion… "Mindscape must have given Nintendo a huge lunch or something as it’s got the rights to use Mario for educational purposes – so you’ll be seeing the cheeky man appear on your Commodore 64 in the first game ‘MARIO IS MISSING’ – which deals with geography. At least you’ll pass your O-level plumbing exam!”
We’re not sure exactly how far this ever reached, but Mindscape already hadn’t released many of their planned titles and this seems to be an idea which never got past the planning stage. 1992 was when a lot of companies were starting to move to the 16-bit platforms sadly.
Of course, we will try and find out more, but it is going to be hard with no leads whatsoever. We’ll just have to hope that something turns up soon…
Firstly… this is not the same as the Ocean version released version that came in around 1986/87… but Atarisoft were actually doing an official conversion themselves back in the early 80’s.
We learn of this conversion thanks to Mat Allen who has documented the conversion briefly in Digital Press. The game itself seems to have sneaked out and was on Gamebase (Which is the entry we have borrowed).
Originally we believed the game was not released due to the video game crash, but actually it was due to issues with development – where the brick layers would not bulge on impact. Although the game was pretty much completed, it was decided not to fully release the game. Later on, Ocean Software did their own conversion of the game – but this is an interesting curiosity to check out.
However on a separate note, Phobos/Ready64 found a snippet in Video Game Update (August 1984 – see scans) which suggests that Jack Tramiel got Atarisoft to stop all C64 developments and focus just on Atari. It wasn’t the video game crash that caused the cancellation of titles. Thanks to Roberto Nicoletti and Phobos for the heads up.
We’re not sure how the game got leaked, but it is lucky that it has been – so you can see a different approach to the conversion.
Made by the same company who made Tank Attack, Marine Attack was to be released by CDS Software sometime around the late eighties. There is no real information on this game, merely a reference to its existence in a statement by CDS about Tank Attack and in the Zzap! magazine review of Tank Attack.
Judging from the reference in Zzap! Magazine, the game was intended as a sequel to Tank Attack, which was a board game/computer game hybrid, where players played on a game board with playing pieces, with the computer acting as a sort of moderator. Marine Attack would have been similar but with cruisers and battleships instead of tanks. CDS must have been confident of having a hit with Tank Attack to be already working on the follow up before the game was even released.
Although an innovative concept, it may have been a contributing factor as to the game’s downfall, as with increased costs of production would come increased pressure for sales and if Tank Attack did not do spectacularly well then perhaps Marine Attack was pulled due to unacceptable risk. On the other hand by planning the follow up before the release of Tank Attack it suggests CDS were confident of having funding to push forward with a release. Nonetheless Tank Attack garnered some positive reviews, getting 80% in Zzap! magazine.
A problem for us is that if the game does ever turn up, its highly unlikely it will come with a playing board and playing pieces, as these would probably have been made after the computer game was created and so may have never even existed. So even if we find the computer-based section of the game its possible it will be unplayable.
In any case it’s a shame the game never saw the light of day, with the retro scene alive and well it would be nice to see both Tank Attack and Marine Attack set up alongside each other at retro events for gamers old and new to play.
Marc In Wonderland is the beginning of what possibily could have been a great game, but we can’t really tell from a preview of this early stage.
The only thing you can do move this blond haired guy called Marc around a single screen set of platforms, and that is it. It looks good enough, but there is a severe lack of anything to get excited about.
We are guessing that this game lost interest very early in development, and the developers moved on and did something else (even left the C64). This is probably all that ever was created.
Nicolas Stark in 2012 stepped forward and shed some light on what was not actually meant to be a proper game!…
"Marc in Wonderland (no idea who made up the name, but I never named it that way ;D ) was merely a test-routine for platform grafix and sprites.The sprite was actually a placeholder and never meant to be used in a game anyway."
So sadly there is nothing more to find on this title – it is confirmed as a test routine and nothing more. Even the title was made up by someone else :-)
Another puzzler which seems to be a tile based game in the style of Sensitive (CF powerpack 17). We assumed at first that this preview was a little unplayable, as nothing much happens – but Artur corrects us later on. Graphically it all seems to be there with titles and some nice ingame graphics. Therefore this preview must be fairly advanced.
The game’s author, Artur Bujdoso had the following to say to GTW about the game:
“I’ve come across to your site and discovered an old game attempt of mine.
The story was the same as in the case of lot young kids in the C64-era in eastern-europe. We had knowledge, made a few demos but had no contacts to game-companies so we made a small demo-game and tried to find contact through “friends”….or so we thought. This is the result of few weeks of work, and having no better idea than doing a “recoloring” game but with three passes (yes, this demo is playable, and even has an end sequence) so the player needs to pass all the fields twice, in order to paint them – to a certain color which I don’t really remember now.
We sent it to someone (forgot the name) who promised to introduce us with it to a game company. Guess what we felt when we saw it later with a crackintro in front of it.
It was the end of our (me and my cousin’s) attempt to produce a game. Later, Attila lost interest in C64 and our “hobby” was never really admitted in our family, at that time.”
It seems that sadly the game was never completed as a result and only reached really this stage. At least something has survived, but hopefully Artur may someday dig out more of his game…
In Your Commodore issue 51 (1988 December, Page 51-54) there was a rather interesting write up with Antony Crowther and Dave Bishop, talking about their development past and their work at the time at Imageworks.
During the interview, it was mentioned that Antony had seen the Electronic Arts release of Marble Madness on the C64 and was not impressed at all. So much so that he produced a proof of concept (possibly something more) and walked up to Ariolasoft and said something along the likes of “I can do better than that – give us a job!”. Not in those exact words i’m sure, but anyway – Ariolasoft were very impressed but couldn’t do anything with the code as they didn’t have the external rights – they did however give Tony a job.
After questioning Tony about this game, we discover that it was no more than the beginnings of Zig Zag. Tony suggested: “Zigzag was showing off, as they were saying it couldn’t be done. Mm on Amiga was brilliant. But my c64 tests weren’t half bad.”
So there is nothing to find which will show a Marble Madness game as such – but look closely next time at Zig Zag to see the clear influences which was the result of a poor C64 conversion of an arcade classic.
No proper name as such, but confirmation thanks to Vinny Mainolfi, that John Twiddy was working on yet another game for the C64, which was mentioned when interviewed in Zzap 64.
In the interview, John mentions that he was working on his own take on Marble Madness, but we were never to see any Marble Madness clone with his name attatched to it.
So just what happened to this game?… Who was to release it?
Well, thanks to Andrew Fisher, we find that it was actually meant to be System 3… In a news piece for Your Computer in March 1986, Mark Cale demonstrated a new System 3 game – to be called Mad Marbles or Crazy Marbles. The obvious inspiration from the description was the arcade game Marble Madness, which got an official conversion thanks to Electronic Arts.
But what happened to Cale’s game? Was this another unfinished System 3 project, or does something still exist?
We need to ask John Twiddy to find out more, but unfortunately he has been very busy lately.
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