Preserving Cancelled & Unreleased Video Game History Since 1999
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.
Thanks to Dr. Doom / Rad / Ons, a very slightly different version of Children’s Trivia by Cybal Software has been preserved for the Commodore 64. A version of the game already exists in Gamebase64, but this has a few very minor differences (and may have been an updated version).
It’s not an unreleased game, so we’re just sharing the preservation here for posterity and for other archives to pick up:
Our good friend Bertrand (and regular contributor to GTW) got in touch recently to flag that John Hardie and himself have been archiving some titles on the Atari 8-bit from a publisher called Maximus (obtained via Tim Kilby, who was one of the programmers). Here are the links:
Bertrand is keen to point out that only Safetyline has been archived for the first time, where Storyline is a revised edition of what is already out there and the rest of the entries contain new scanned material. We will be shortly adding C64 entries for Storyline and Safetyline (which is why Bertrand in particular flagged these recoveries). This is just a sample of what is being recovered and preserved on a regular basis at Atarimania.com, so be sure to keep checking in with them.
Our next entry into the Games That Weren’t archive is an extremely early and unfinished PC DOS shooter called Duel. The idea of the game would have been to fight against a CPU or second player and duel against each other across a parallax landscape.
The game was being written by Finlay Munro, and was based off his cancelled Commodore 64 game of the same name that was due for release by Quicksilva in the 1980s. It’s likely that graphics are by either Wayne Billingham and/or David Bland. Continue reading
Like the first two films before it, Ocean Software got the licence to produce a game based on the underrated third Robocop film and it would famously come out two years before the film would (due to the studio Orion Pictures going bankrupt).
The 16 bit formats got a beautiful 3D game (which despite what people say still stands out today) while the C64 and Spectrum got 2D platform affairs. It never came out on the Amstrad. Continue reading
Pinball Construction Set was a title that I lost many hours to constructing various pinball tables, and many others did too. Unbeknown to many of us, a Commodore Amiga version was also on the cards way back in 1986 from Electronic Arts.
The Amiga version was to have real pinball sounds, tilt, exciting music and 28 working parts in total. The construction kit would be easy-to-use, where you could use mouse or joystick to set up your table. Continue reading
Pocket Panic is a great homebrew title by Steve Jones that was released in 1999 for the Game Boy Color as part of the Bung Coding competition. It is a neat modern mix of Loder Runner and Panic Planet, and with possible inspirations from other games.
Today we’re adding what might be a later prototype of the game which was being tidied up/adjusted for Graphic State in 1999. It features a different start intro, but also very different sprite graphics – with a Jetman main character and shaded in enemies, baby and bomb sprites. Continue reading
Another prototype from the Enigma Variations archives, with the SNES version of Kick Off. Just the one prototype this time, with a PAL edition dated the 24th July 1992.
This seems to be an extremely late build of the game, and is very close to the final version and likely to have just very minor differences tucked away. We couldn’t see anything obviously different – and it could be a case of small bug fixes being missing. Continue reading
A huge Commodore 64 surprise to kick off the week with Games That Weren’t adding the sadly cancelled playable prototype of the Indiana Jones 3 adventure. An unofficial conversion of the great Lucasfilm Games title with bags of promise, but wasn’t to be. Check it out here:
https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/indiana-jones-and-the-last-crusade-adventure/
Empire wasn’t a label one would normally associate with the Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum, with just a handful of titles (Pipe Mania, Dr Doom’s Revenge, Gazza’s Super Soccer, Gazza 2) and a compilation (Soccer Stars) under it’s belt.
Following the success of their Captain America and Spiderman crossover game Dr Doom’s Revenge, Empire picked up the licence to produce a stand alone game featuring Spiderman. Continue reading
It’s not just games that we preserve at Games That Weren’t, but we try and preserve a variety of software which hasn’t yet been digitized or made available online. Thanks to the sterling efforts of Aaron White, we have a set of 9 Amiga Public Domain disks that had yet to be preserved (until now!).
These contain a set of music demos, and also PD library catalogues which feature music, images and introduction sequences created especially. Hopefully these will be eventually redistributed into various Amiga archives. 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.
Games That Weren't® is the registered trademark of Frank Gasking.
