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.
Another puzzle game which i’m not sure exactly what you have to do.
However, I can tell you that the game features some nice graphics and sound.
This game was obviously being created in the aim of being sold commercially, though a company hasn’t been named in the game.
It’s not known if a company did show interest in this game or not, or whatever happened to the game. The game looks pretty much complete at the stage you can see. Possibly just a few more level designs were needed.
A 3D Operation Wolf style blaster featuring 2000 AD’s Barbie lookalike Psi-Judge Anderson gunning down the evil Judge Death’s zombie hordes. Unlike previous games of this genre, Judge Death actually showed your hand clasping the lethal Lawgiver (gun favoured by Mega City One Judges), though aiming and shooting was via the usual cross hairs.
It’s not a brilliant game by any means, but for its time it looked pretty good. The main problem with the game was that they apparently used Koala Pad to design all the backgrounds, and unfortunately the C64 did not have the power to shift them around effectively. Piranha were apparently quite annoyed off with the conversion according to graphic artist Stephen (SIR) Robertson.
The game was being developed by Hobbyte, a Hungarian team of around 10 programmers in total, who were according to Crash magazine (issue 47, December 1978, page 88), preparing the game for the ZX Spectrum, C64 and Amstrad.
Stephen was drafted in to make the graphics “Less clean”, and add some graffiti around the place. He did do some nice Dark Judges sprites in addition to his work, but these were sadly never used. Piranha software sadly went under with debts, and this game was caught up in it all. A lot of publicity went into this game, and some of this you can see within the scans area.
What is interesting is that a version of the game, seeming to feature a number of levels was released in 1989 and now credited to Novatrade. There are suggestions that they picked up the game, removed references to Judge Death and then released it in limited numbers under a new name of Horror City.
There have been suggestions of some C64 fans having purchased an original copy, though as of yet none of surfaced and we haven’t seen a box scan yet of the game. Can you help us confirm if Horror City was released in any shape or form?
This is an entry for a long lost Atarisoft conversion of Joust for the Commodore 64, due for release back in 1984. The game had made it across to a variety of platforms, but the C64 game was thought to be caught up in the collapse of the company.
However, 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.
Many believed that the conversion would end up being released by another company under the name of Jouste. However, this was just an unofficial clone written by Kim McCherry and not official at any stage.
Some years ago, GTW put up a photo of the C64 conversion that was on display at a show of some kind in the early 80’s. This proved that a conversion had been started and did indeed exist, but who was behind the conversion?
Sadly, it was unclear who the developer/artist was. The photo though had come from General Computing Corp’s Steven J Szymanski – so was it by him? Steven confirmed to GTW that it seems it was based on his very own Atari 800 version of the game, but not done by himself. He had no idea who was behind the conversion. Looking at other Atarisoft games, we suggested names such as Joe Hellesen and Tom Griner, but to no avail with regards to confirming when we tried to get in touch with them.
After hitting a bit of a brick wall, in late May 2020 – preservationist Ken Van Mersbergen got in touch and stunned us all by confirming that he had fully preserved the game. Ken explains how this happened and how he came to find the game:
“I was going through the archive of a retired programmer who used to work for Roklan Corporation and On-Time software. I was reading and converting some 8-inch CP/M disks when I came across a couple of files named JOUST on a disk containing the source code for C64 Popeye.
At the time I thought nothing of it as I was just converting the files for his digital archive. Months later I came across your site and saw that C64 Joust was never released so I sent back to the archive to see what system the Joust files were for. To my delight it turned out to be C64 Joust!”
The remarkable discovery was just the start of the hard work now involved. Ken now had to preserve the contents of the disk and try and get everything up and running once more.
“I copied the 3 files to my system and examined them. I was able to convert the HEX file to a binary file for testing and the game fired up in VICE with no problems. I then set upon converting the source code to a modern compiler (DASM). After a few days I was able to get the code to compile into a binary and run as a cartridge on a C64.”
As a result, GTW was able to share some proper screenshots of the game at long last. Ken would allow GTW to host the game, but first wanted to do a special presentation at a gaming event in the USA during September 2020. Attentions turned to trying to figure out who exactly had coded the game – sadly the source code gave no suggestions or clues.
Ken believed that Joe Hellesen was the developer at Roklan Corporation, and GTW did too – as his name was on an old Joust resource alongside the C64 conversion. Ken managed to get hold of Joe, who could not recall who programmed Joust. Attentions have now since turned to Cameron Shaffer (from On-Time Software) and GTW also wonders once more if Tom Griner may have had a part to play after all. Another theory could be that maybe it was the C64 programmer of Popeye – after all, it was found on the same disk! Hopefully in time the mystery will be solved on that front.
Well, in January 2022 it was confirmed that the game was indeed programmed by Jack Verson – who programmed the earlier iteration of Popeye that was recovered for GTW64 in 2021. This is thanks to contributor Michael and his comment added to this page.
In a video interview, he tells the story that another programmer was assigned Joust originally to complete within 5 months. He hadn’t managed to get far, so Jack had to step in, at which point he took the Atari version, disassembled it and ported to the C64 in just 3 weeks. The downside that Jack highlights is that the C64 version inherited the same bugs.
In August 2023, contributor Nick Guida was researching games that Joe Hellesen had created, and in his gameography from 2000 (for a company bio), he was listed as working on Joust as a programmer (see scans). It could be that Joe was the original programmer before Jack later took over and redid the game.
As for the game itself – GTW would wait for the release in September, but then COVID-19 would sadly see yet another show cancelled. Ken had planned to show the game at the VCFMW event, but due to the restrictions, it was never to be. As a result, Ken has very kindly allowed GTW to release the game earlier in July 2020 for you all to enjoy. Ken in the meantime continues to try and figure out who programmed the game. Here is a video of the game in action:
So finally after over 30 years, the official Joust conversion can now be played once more. It seems to be a complete conversion, with all of the key game play elements present and it is very playable overall. Quite possibly some aspects could have been better (such as the graphics and sound), which is easy to say nowadays, but it is an important piece of gaming history finally preserved none-the-less and should not be missed.
A huge thank you to Ken Van Mersbergen for his fantastic preservation work and for getting in touch with GTW to share his finding. Enjoy!
More of the same from Players, with the 3rd and final game in the series. The game got a release on the Spectrum and Amstrad, and got good grades to end things. The C64 version was mentioned within another Player’s game inlay and mentioned that it was coming soon.
Months past after the Spectrum and Amstrad releases, but no C64 version ever made it. Why?.. We are not sure.
For now we are assuming that the same author of the sequel on the C64 would have maybe done number 3 too. We need confirmation though. It could be another developer was assigned, but couldn’t get it finished for various reasons.
A lot more research needed, but could we find something like we did with Fungus 2?
Thanks to contributors, we have learnt that the Spectrum edition of the game did include loading instructions for the C64 edition. So it is seeming more and more likely that a C64 version is out there somewhere. And in late November 2019, Fabrizio Bartoloni dug out details of the developers from the Amstrad inlay, so we now know who was doing the conversion!
We managed to get in touch with the artist, who sadly has nothing of the game – but they confirmed that they had completed all their graphic work and handed everything over to Kevin Parker. They were surprised to learn that the game was never released.
We are now awaiting a response from Kevin to see if he may have something of the game. Watch this space!
Joan of Arc was a 2D strategy based game which was eventually released in 1989 on the Amiga and ST. However, it seems that a C64 version was on the cards with this following snippet of news mentioned in The Games Machine 10/88:
“Watch out for a bigger preview next month of Rainbow Art’s epic arcade adventure quest, Joan of Art. The Dussledorf-based company have already given us Great Giana Sisters, but style although it boasts the same polished gameplay. Taking the form of a film (somewhat like Defender of the Crown et al), the game is for 16-bit first, with a Commodore 64/128 version expected. Stay tuned!”
Unfortunately as you can guess, nothing ever surfaced, so the question is whether the game ever got to any stage of converting at all, or if things were scrapped early on before anything was started. Rainbow Arts continued to produce games for the C64 up until 1991, so there is a good chance that this was started. And its a game I’m sure would have converted over just fine.
However, we are uncertain who would have been behind the conversion, so it is very much early days for this entry. A reference in https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ric_Chahi does suggest that the game was going to be released on the C64, and that Eric Chahi was involved – but its unlikely. Or maybe not?
Also, thanks to contributor Michael Huth – an advert was printed, clearly listing the C64 version as coming soon on disk. No C64 screenshots though in the advert. Source of the advert is from Preservation64 wiki.
Do you know anything about this conversion? If so, please do get in touch!
This may possibly be what turned into Ace 2088, the space version of Ace. Jihad was the working title for the game which John Cassells pixelled some work for.
John had the following to say… "I *might* have some graphics for the game I was working on for Cascade when I left… with a working title of Jihad (which at the time was a lot less controversial than in todays climate :)) it was a space based flight sim (think Ace 2 in space) Don’t think I ever had any running demos though as the main coder, Ian Martin was very protective about his code."
We do not know anything else about the game at present, and much more research is needed. Sadly we lost contact with John some time back, and need to get back in touch with him.
Ian Martin now needs to be tracked down so we can question him about the game and see if we can find out more. We may be unlikely to distribute anything we find due to Ian being protective of his code, but hopefully he’ll be willing to allow us to put some of his old work on the web or at least answer some questions.
A very old school type of game here, with a main jet which has to be guided through a series of caverns. This is similiar in a way to Killer Watt, though lacking a lot of what that game had in terms of playability. Even the graphics leave a bit to be desired.
There is no known plot to the game – but we find out why thanks to Philipp Dopichaj who tells GTW:
“This original version was a demo for a game programming course in 64’er Sonderheft 73, JET ACTION has slightly updated graphics (sprites only) and tiny variations in level design. I doubt this was ever a commercial release, it’s just a lame “crack” of a game that was provided as source code with a level editor … The original demo is labeled “64’er game”.
Find attached the original version of the game that’s JET ACTION in your database, as released on 64’er Sonderheft 73. After decrunching has finished and the program has crashed, do a reset and SYS 3*4096.”
So this was not a proper game meant for release, and was just cracked… it was merely a programming tutorial. So we can close the case on this one :-)
J.Morrison Micros was a very early development company that produced games for the Commodore 64 such as Bonka, Cybermen and Vultures … unfortunately they disappeared rather quickly too.
In issue 86 of Home Computer Weekly, another game called Jellybones was mentioned as a new title coming soon from the company. Unfortunately it never did and today the game is still at large.
We know very little apart from the mention in HCW, so do you know any more about the game?
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