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.
A short entry for a Commodore MAX title that was proposed, but never finished and released.
Hall Of The Mountain King by E.F. Dryer’s Keith Dryer looks like it was instead published as “Mountain King” by Beyond for C64 and VIC-20, and by CBS for Atari systems. Gaming historian Kate Willaert wonders if the game was perhaps nabbed from Commodore.
If you know anything more about this MAX development, please do get in touch!
A short entry for a Commodore MAX title that was proposed, but never finished and released.
Racetrack Special we assume was a horse racing game of some kind, but we know little more about it so far, apart from that the VIC group were working on it.
If you know anything more about this MAX development, please do get in touch!
A short entry for a Commodore MAX title that was proposed, but never finished and released.
This was a game that was originally being developed for the VIC 20 as a Jeff Bruette experiment (converting Cosmic Cruncher into something else. It doesn’t seem like it got very far at all on either platform.
If you know anything more about this MAX development, please do get in touch!
A short entry for a Commodore MAX title that was proposed, but never finished and released.
Sargon II was being converted by the VIC group, and would likely have been a quick port of the VIC-20 edition. In the end, Hayden Book Company did their own version for the C64 a year later. Did Commodore themselves ever start anything?
If you know anything more about this MAX development, please do get in touch!
A short entry for a Commodore MAX title that was proposed, but never finished and released.
Menagerie was a sort of Frogger style game, and was released on the VIC 20.
If you know anything more about this MAX development, please do get in touch!
A short entry for a Commodore MAX title that was proposed, but never finished and released.
Ace Of Aces was based on the tabletop game by Nova, and nothing to do with the flight game we saw in later years on the C64.
If you know anything more about this MAX development, please do get in touch!
A short entry for a Commodore MAX title that was proposed, but never finished and released. Spiders From Mars was eventually released on the Commodore VIC 20 and was a sort of Defender style game.
Spiders Of Mars for Max was actually completed and handed off for evaluation on Aug 20, 1982, and Greenhouse was handed off for evaluation a few weeks later, but neither game showed up for the Max launch in Japan.
If you know anything more about a MAX conversion, please do get in touch!
A short entry for the site called Avenger and which was developed by Eispach Csaba who coded Memory Man which is already on GTW. At this stage, we’re not sure what kind of game it was.
Csaba Virag found title screen remains on a work disk and the Singular Crew members helped to make a binary from it. Soci / SGR says the disk contains no more, however Csaba has added the work disk as well so you can download both.
At the moment we don’t have anything playable, just this title screen. The developer Csaba Einspach says the game was almost finished, so there is a playable version somewhere out there. Csaba Virag hopes to find it some day, though the developer has lost all their cassettes and disks, so it could be a long shot. So, check your disks and if anyone can find anything of the game itself – please do get in touch!
Posted in: GTW64 archive | Kevin in the Woods (also known as Goethe in Halberstadt) is an action-adventure game developed by Bamse (aka Squidward) for the Forum64 Game Competition 2015, where it placed 6th.
The game features a top-down perspective, with NPCs, enemies, collectible items and puzzles. A notable feature is its day/night cycle, which changes the game’s colour tone and affects gameplay throughout. Players explore both indoor and outdoor areas, avoiding dangers like bats while solving puzzles and interacting with the environment.
Though the game was never officially completed, Bamse continued development after the competition but did not release a finalized version. Bamse talks about the development of game in this forum thread at Forum64.
In 2018, the group Excess released an updated (but still unfinished) version, possibly based on Bamse’s latest work – but that we’re not quite sure yet.
It is a pretty decent game overall, but sadly it seems may have been abandoned. We hope that is not the case and that Bamse will come back to it to finish off.
A short entry which is thanks to gaming Kate Willaert of a Concentration game that was being created by Jimmy Snyder during the early Commodore 64 launch days.
According to Jimmy, Jack Tramiel liked the game, but told him to add sound to it. It is likely that this is the same game that Michael Tomczyk recommended for a game to come with the Commodore MAX computer (see scans).
Kate asked Jimmy if he had kept any of his old work, and sadly he confirmed he hadn’t. However, Kate wonders if perhaps the game may have leaked out in another form like with Greenhouse. There was a possibility it was a title called Matchmaker, but we found that this was another title by someone else.
Hopefully something of it will be found in the future. In the meantime, if you know anything more about the development – please do get in touch.