Welcome to Games That Weren't!

We are an 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

Lords Of The Rising Sun

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

Yet another C64 conversion of a Cinemaware game hits the GTW archives, and this time another classic in the form of “Lords of the Rising Sun”.

Very similiar in style to Defender of the Crown, Lords of the Rising Sun this time set you in 12th century Japan, doing various battles and interactive sequences.

The C64 conversion was not overly official, though an Amiga review of the game stated that a C64 conversion was coming soon. Zzap also confirmed that a C64 version was coming soon in a preview page in issue 49 on page 89. The C64 was also listed in the ACE magazine review as “Under development”. Sadly nothing more was ever heard – the usual story!

With a large list now of C64 titles which never saw the light of day, we now need to start tracking down some developers from Cinemaware to find out more about these lost conversions.

This is all we currently know at the moment. There seems to be no screenshots or anything else released in any of the press. It’s down to research and the hope that someone will someday get in touch.

Do you know anything about this GTW?…

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Lords Of Chaos Expansion Pack

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Not really a sequel, but an extra upgrade pack was planned for this popular title by Julian Gollop, and mentioned in the original game’s review.

The expansion pack was to include extra scenarios to be integrated with the original game. However, nothing ever seemed to had surfaced of this pack, and it had since been forgotten.

Although not a full game in itself, it would be nice to find any new scenarios by Julian if there had been some created but never released. Could they be saved?

Well, yes… thanks to Mat Allen, we discover that the game was released and possibily in limited numbers too. He has kindly provided TAP images and scans which we can present to you here! As you can see, the game comes with no packaging… this is because people had to send a cupon to get the expansion pack, which maybe not many people did.

Did this get a full release, or is this a very small leak of the expansion pack? This could well be case closed already, and not technically a GTW, but this entry will remain for archivial purposes.

Another note, thanks to research by GTW regular, Peter Weighill, we discover that the C64 coder was infact Nick Gollop, and not Julian (He only did Spectrum and Amstrad versions).

Also… this expansion pack is also in Gamebase, listed as Lords of Chaos 2. This is a disk version, whereas Mat has submitted a rather rare Tape version which is very obscure. Case closed then! :-)

Case closed!

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 1 Comment

Lord Of The Rings

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

Even though this game made it out as a graphical text adventure, Lord of the Rings was to also be a RPG version of the game which was to be made as the last phase of C-64 releases by Interplay. The game had originally started out as an original title called Secrets of the Magi.

The american-based team finished off the game and actually based the SNES version on the finished C-64 game. Charles Deenen/MON made the music for it, a great couple of tunes which have sneaked out and are available in the HVSC.

Some more info about the game is available at: http://www.lysator.liu.se/tolkien-games/entry/lotr1.html

The game was eventually released just on the Amiga in 1991, but the C64 version was nowhere to be found.

In 2013, research in the May 1990 edition of The Games Machine showed a special article on the production of the game, where we finally learn of the developer’s name – Troy Miles. Shortly after we learn that Dan Burke was the graphic artist on the game. In the article were also some screenshots of the C64 game, so here they are!

Now we have some leads in place – we really hope to learn more about what happened to this conversion.

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 2 Comments

Lord Mc Sun

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

A sequel to the wonderful Heavenbound game by Cosmos Designs was in production for Cherry Software in 1996. It caused a bit of a storm in a software drought era for the C64, promising some great new gameplay, and with a left-right scrolling perspective.

A lot similar to the Fred’s Back series, Lord MC Sun had the typical great graphics and sounds like with past Cosmos Designs games, and no doubt would have been a great late release for the C64.

Unfortunately, as with many of the Cherry Software games, Lord MC Sun was scrapped. This was likely due to the event of companies not making a good profit anymore, and Cosmos Designs pulled out of the C64 scene after realising this leaving 3 unfinished games behind.

It is not known how much more work Cosmos Designs actually completed since this preview, and before it was scrapped. Hannes Sommer suggested that this was as far as the game had ever got.

Case sadly closed for this one.

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Lone Wolf – Ice Halls Of Terror

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

A bit of an interesting entry this time, and a game which had some brief involvement from Jon Hare in his pre-Sensible days doing graphics in various bit parts for games.

Lone Wolf seems to be part of a series based on Role playing books that had a greater release rate on the ZX Spectrum. There were two initial games back in 1984 based on the books that were called “Lone Wolf – Flight from the Dark” and “Lone Wolf – Fire on the Water”. These were both graphic adventure games. But then in 1991, Audiogenic released a tied in game called “Lone Wolf – The Mirror of Death”. Ice Halls of Terror was second part of a series based upon “Lone Wolf” gamebooks that was never published” … http://quattrobit.blogspot.com/2011/11/intervista-alla-sensible-software.html

What is very odd is that the early adventures are deemed as the first two parts of the game – Jon Hare suggested that Lone Wolf In The Ice Halls of Terror was the second part of a series that never saw the light of day on the C64.
Certainly the other Lone Wolf games (Apart from the Audiogenic release) never saw the light of day.

So really we are dealing with two potential GTW’s here, and not just this game. There is a prequel very likely that will need an entry adding at somepoint in the future. However, check out the scan thanks to Peter Weighill for obtaining, which confirms the game and publisher.

Jon later confirmed in 2015 that the game was being developed by LT Software, and featured his first ever piece of full screen artwork. Sadly Jon never met the rest of the team and has no recollection about who they were and how far the development got.

It is believed that LT Software went under before the game could be completed. Do you know anything more?…

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 3 Comments

Log X

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

A game which sadly could be lost forever… This was a title by Artur Bujdoso (Who created Marbloid which is also in the archives) that was mimicking "Dynamix" and "Compunet". The game got to a kind of "playable preview" but it can only be found in Artur’s memories as far as he knows.

There doesn’t seem to be any version of it in existance … though we do live in hope that Artur will find some disks in the future with something of the game on that we can preserve for posterity.

We know little more than this tiny titbit for now. Maybe you were involved on the game with Artur and have something on it to salvage?… Please get in touch!

Can this game ever be found?…

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 1 Comment

Lock On

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

An interesting conversion which never seems to have got much spotlight, but was indeed a C64 conversion in the workings. Confirmation made by the screenshots printed in Commodore User magazine back in the time.

This was kind of a cross between Top Gun and G-Loc back in the day, and was a conversion of an old Data East/Tatsumi Coin-op which wasn’t too well known compared to the likes of Afterburner. From the screenshots we can see a game which seems to have been taking shape, although looking a little plain.

Looking at the time of the screenshots, it seems to suggest that the game was in development around the same time that R-Type V1 and Time Scanner V1 was being worked on. Could this have been part of the same development team behind one of these games?

Well, if you look carefully at the font at the top of the game, it is practically identical to the font used in The Real Ghostbusters and Karnov, which were both developed by Mr. Micro Ltd. This means that we could be looking at Greg Duddle/Jason Heggie as developer, James McDermott as graphic artist and perhaps Dave Jones as musician.

Apart from the preview mention in Commodore User, the game was never seen again. It wasn’t long until we learnt why. Commodore User (August 1988) had the following news article which explained why this never quite surfaced:

In a shock development, Mediagenic/Activision have announced that they won’t now be releasing their licensed conversion of psychedelic coin-op shoot ’em up, Lock On. This is the second major coin-op licence which has failed to appear from Activision – there is still no sign of their long overdue 64 version of Super Hang-On. In both cases the programming house involved in the conversion work was Southampton-based Electric Dreams.

The decision to drop Lock-On came after a review of the work-in-progress to date. According to an Activision spokesperson. “Basically the 64 version wasn’t fast enough, and it just wouldn’t have been an economic proposition to continue working on it. It just didn’t look like it was going to be up to standard without a lot more time and money being invested in it”. The company felt that they had no option other than to scrap the game.

“Though we’re obviously very disappointed to have to shelve a game, it just wasn’t coming together on play test. And frankly, its a lot better than releasing sub-standard product. After all, play testers are ultimately there to stop consumers from being ripped off”.

Well, never stopped Activision before on the C64! But still, its a huge shame. So, the game was overall dropped merely because of speed issues. From the looks of things, it used a vector based approach, maybe sprites could have been better used?

Recently a guy called Kjell got in touch as he had some computer game T-Shirts from the late 80’s and we think from computer shows. One of the shirts is a Activision/Mediagenic shirt for Lock On, see the photos below in the gallery.

In a strange twist in 2012 – Mtboggs88 (based in the USA) from the Lemon64 forum came across a manual for Lock On which was labelled for the Commodore 64 and disk based. Here it is. After some digging, it seems like the game was released on the PC, Atari ST for Data East US by Quicksilver … http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksilver_Software

Quicksilver of course did the US versions of Ikari Warriors and various others which differed to the UK versions. This suggests that there were possibly two Lock-On games in production, both in the US and UK and neither got a release! We found it on sale as well in a US sales catalog from August 1988.

The C64 label seems to have been a cock up though on all released versions. An ST website confirming this with scans of the manual including the C64 label. So, did a US version also exist and do we need a separate entry for that?

Martin/Stadium64 found another advert for the game which included the C64 sticker – so it is seeming more likely that a conversion was under way. Where is it now though?

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Last Ninja 4

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

As the C64 was dying, Jon Wells was out there trying to save it. This was one of Jon’s big efforts to try and save the scene, and bring one final Last Ninja to the C64.

Jon created a series of demos, and music was created to try and convince System 3 that they could make one final game in the series.

Jon was planning to allow the Ninja to interact more with the background of the game, and be able to walk on the grass. Therefore not being restricted to just moving on the path. This was shown in a test demo of one of the Last Ninja 2 levels, where the Ninja could actually go on the grass.

A map was even created of one of the levels proposed by Jon to be in the game, but sadly System 3 turned down Jon’s proposal to bring the game to the C64 (Even with Jon willing to take the whole project on himself), so Jon moved on.

All that exists are a series of previews, the scanned map and lots of cool music by Feekzoid (The intro tune incomplete) and Jon for the game.

Joerg Droege informed GTW64 in 2017 that X-Style were about to take the game on with permission from Jon Wells in 2003. The team was interviewed in an earlier issue of Scene World magazine: http://sceneworld.org/emu/swo08.html

In particular CJ/X-Style was doing the game by himself, doing a brand new engine. Bas Bertens was working on the graphics, and Soren Lund on music. No permission was gained from System 3, suggesting that they would release the game unofficially and possibly with a different main character. Nothing ever happened, so it sounds like it never got past the official planning stages.

Case closed… this is all that exists of Last Ninja 4 on the C64…

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 6 Comments

Living Dead

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

An incomplete game from the 80’s, similar to Ghost and Goblins and Shadow Of The Beast, with functional graphics. Living Dead puts you in the control of a skeleton who roams around a ghost town, but roaming around for what reason is actually unknown – as there is no plot with the game.

The game looks and feels about 50% complete, with a fairly short map, which scrolls horizontally in both directions. Controls are a little awkward, and there is nothing to really do. For a game of its time, it certainly looks promising, and something which you may have seen on a budget label back in the day.

There are no details in the preview about who actually worked on the game, and any company name. But we did think this was actually the work of Tony Crowther, as the character set is certainly his. Though with different music and no visible credits, it could be that someone just used Tony’s charset.

Called “Forest”, this charset was actually used in an obscure Mr Chip game called Project X that was released on a Triple Decker pack by Alternative Software. In the Project X game, there is some text where the coder Dirk Lee refers to visiting Tony at Gremlin and thanking him for letting him use his Forest charset. The very same charset that you can find here.

So we hope to find out more from Tony himself very soon about this one. Maybe this was even another production by Dirk Lee?

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