Documenting unreleased, cancelled and prototype video games.
Covering unreleased and cancelled video games, plus prototypes and early versions of games on a variety of consoles and computers. We are a large archive dedicated to preserving games that were never released to the public. Sharing history and stories from the developers, assets and more before it is too late.
We are a non-profit digitisation project, aiming to digitally preserve software and history which would otherwise be lost for good. If for any reason there is anything that you do not wish to be on the website, please contact us for removal.
A quick post from us, thanks to Fabrizio Bartoloni. Fabrizio has recently located a couple of unreleased DOS games online on the classicdosgames.com website and has shared some links if you want to check them out:
With thanks to Fabrizio Bartoloni!
Mega Twins (known as Chiki Chiki Boys in Japan) was a sickly cute platformer produced by Capcom in the early 90’s, a slight sideways turn from the likes of Strider, Final Fight and Ghouls n Ghosts, no doubt to tap into the younger players and their 10 pence pieces. Many of us probably would have vomited at the sight of it and went back to kicking several barrels of crap out of bad guys in Final Fight.
The game consisted of you controlling two twins who carry swords and had to cross various platform levels to kill the dragon which killed their Father and find the Dragon Blue Eyes stone and save their world. The game was predominantly a sideways scrolling platformer, but with some vertical scrolling portions and a later castle level, where you would climb vertically to mix things up a bit. Large guardians would feature throughout as well to provide a fair challenge to even the most hardened of gamers. Continue reading
Claws of the Devil is a late Amiga title that was in development back in 1998, and was a first person action game for platforms with expanded memory, additional graphics cards and PPC turbo cards according to Amiga Computer Studio.
However, other magazines would state that the game was to be more like Tomb Raider, with a 3rd person camera viewpoint and controlling a female protagonist called Teri Fletcher across 13 large levels.
Back in 1991, C64 developer and musician Dave Spicer decided to put together a technical demo for a potential conversion of Xenon 2 for the ZX Spectrum.
What was produced was pretty stunning – with a 25 fps scrolling demo that was full-screen and featured some very nice graphics by Jason Brashill. Even though they were quite minimal to give a feel of the game, they still looked amazing at that early stage.
Unfortunately, Mirrorsoft were not keen on doing any 8-bit conversions, so turned down the submission. At a slightly later date, Dave added parallax scrolling to match the 16-bit conversions, which slowed the game down slightly.
The plan was to send both this new version and the faster version without parallax scrolling to Your Sinclair magazine to try and publicise the conversion and hopefully drum up interest to get Mirrorsoft to reconsider. Sadly it didn’t happen, and as a result the game was cancelled.
Some 30 years or so since, the demos have finally been digitally preserved and Dave has made video available of the game in action. At this stage, there are no snapshots for download – but this may change soon, so watch this space!
You can also read about various rumours and details of a C64 conversion that seemingly never was.
With thanks to Dave Spicer for the details and notice about his video release.
You could say that our next entry was quite ahead of its time when due for release back in 1991. Cyber Fight was to build on the recent success of Street Fighter 2 and produce a fighting game within a 3D environment and first person view, heavily inspired it seems by the 1989 film Robot Jox.
The game’s author (Michael Powell) was no stranger to 3D titles, having previously developed the impressive Powerdrome a few years earlier for Electronic Arts. This time you were the pilot of a large robot within a hi-tech arena, who has to smash your opponent’s droid to pieces. Continue reading
A short entry on a title that was being created by Confounding Factor, a company founded in 1997 by former Core Design’s Toby Gard and Paul Douglas.
Galleon hit a number of development issues overall, including seeing Interplay cancel the title at one stage, and was being developed for a number of different platforms over the years. However, only the Xbox edition of the game would ever see release in 2004. Continue reading
I’ve always been a fan of racing games on 8-bit and 16-bit platforms, especially Slicks on the C64 and Micro Machines on the NES. So when Darren Gurney highlighted this long lost Amiga title, I was quite excited when I saw the screenshots.
The Big End (or The Big Engine, as it was known before that) was due for release on the Commodore Amiga around late 1994, mid 1995. Developed by The Hidden (who had created Donk! The Samurai Duck amongst others) and to be published by Supervision. Continue reading
DISCLAIMER: We are a non-profit digitisation project, aiming to digitally preserve software and history which would otherwise be lost for good. If for any reason there is anything that you do not wish to be on the website, please contact us for removal.