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.

Latest News and Posts

Heavy Barrel

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

This was to be an Ikari Warriors style game converted from the Data East arcade to the C64 by F.A.C.S (Financial Accounting and Computing Software) – a West Bloomfield Township, Michigan company.

Previously and very strangely, Sales Curve were linked to the game back in 1988 with a separate development which seemed to fall through after FIL (The French company with Sales Curve as its UK division) lost funding. However in 1989, another team picked up the licence it seems. According to a wiki page – the engine and much of the game-play was in place – but the development company folded before the project could be finished off. The game however did eventually get published on NES, PC, Apple II in 1989 by Data East.

So has anything survived of this game?… Where did the information on F.A.C.S come from originally?….. Was it from an employee of the company who could help us find the game?… A Data East sales leaflet from 1989 stated that the game was due for release in Summer’89… which of course never happened.

Well, in May 2014 – Chris Teslak got in touch with GTW64 and confirmed that he was one of the developers who worked on the conversion. He left the company before the company went under. He was working on the game with another developer and his supervisor (names unconfirmed as of yet). This was to be the only game which FACS ever had any involvement in on the C64 at least – they could have been involved in more, but it was not to be due to FACS closing down before their Heavy Barrel conversion could see a release. FACS did do work on conversions of The Games – Winter Edition and Spiderbot to the PC – more details under creator speaks.

The plan was to release the Heavy Barrel conversion to Data East in 6 deliverables in total, and according to Chris he believes that they got up to the 4th deliverable at the time of cancellation.

Most of the game was translated to the C64 by playing the arcade game and making notes and capturing requirements. Most of the specifics of the development you can read from Chris himself under Creator Speaks, which is a fascinating read!. The game was shaping up very nicely, but the company couldn’t quite hold on to see the game out.

It is still early days, but Chris has offered hope that he may still have something of the game to save and preserve. It is very hopeful, but we could see the beginnings of the conversion at a fairly advanced state.

In April 2025, contributor Michael Huth flagged up that the game was still being advertised as “TBD” (To Be Decided?) up until 1991 in a Data East catalogue. So had the game been complete and Data East were still thinking about releasing?

Watch this space for now!

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 8 Comments

Heavy Barrel

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

This was to be an Ikari Warriors style game converted from the SNK arcade.

In total there were two versions planned – This version was the first and which Commodore User, September 1988 issue mentioned that French software company FIL had got the licence. UK representatives of FIL were The Sales Curve who were to do the conversion. Then there was a later version in 1989 which you can read more about here, and sounds more promising!…

It seems that FIL lost funding, and Sales Curve possibly decided against converting it and sticking to a small selection of games.

We hope to find out more, but it seems we may have two versions to find!… See the other review we have!

More on this soon we hope…

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Hawkeye 2

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Hawkeye 2 was something that original coder Mario van Zeist wanted to realise, with better graphics, sound and more added twists to the gameplay.

It was going to be released under the Thalamus label, but was never completed due to some disagreement, which is not yet known. Hopefully more talks with Mario will clear this up.

The game was never fully completed unfortunately. Music over the years was preserved and can be found in HVSC, written by Markus Schneider. We believe more tunes may exist somewhere.

Thomas Heinrich came forward recently and confirmed that he and Michael Detert did graphics. Thomas Detert was also doing the music with Markus.

After cancellation of the game, graphics were used in various titles such as Greystorm, Genloc and Darksword by X-ample Architectures.

However in 2010, Onslaught managed to recover a large amount of remains of Hawkeye 2 from the developers, mostly in the shape of the graphics done for the game. But most shockingly with news of the sequel to be completed (More on this in a bit), with the teaser preview came an original preview done from 1989 of the original game and graphics. Think Hawkeye mixed with Deadlock, and you get Hawkeye 2, and it is a very promising demo with some superb graphics and paralax scrolling.

As well as being left and right based, there are lifts in the game and small intersections. The game looked to be a large step forward in comparison to the first game. But this was all there ever was. We are proud to add a glimpse though after many years of hunting for it!

But the best news has to be regarding Onslaught looking to produce a proper brand new Hawkeye 2 game, based on the graphics with a load of improvements and extras. The game is being written from scratch and features around 25 lines of parallax scrolling with plenty of CPU cycles left free. Check the preview out from here, but it looks superb! The game in total will have around 12 levels.

Jazzcat also had this to say about the new development:

"We have been working on it for some time, (I am project manager and have been overseeing level design and storyboard). The game will feature 25-charline full colour parallax in both NTSC and PAL, obviously with some (very flexible) restrictions. It will hopefully feature 8-directional shooting, 32 sprites (might be scaled back to 24), delta sprite animation compression for long animation sequences of small pieces (think discharged bullets, muzzle flashes, reloading, etc), separate hair animation engine, based on jumping, changing direction, and wind sources. Of course there will be much more!

While we did start from the original Hawkeye 2 development disks from the X-Ample guys, H2-new features a 100% rewrite, using far less memory and raster time to allow the game to go beyond just a simple shoot and collect.

We’re all in full acknowledgment that good graphics do not cover bad gameplay; the gameplay has just as much design going behind it as the technical feature set. A website will arrive soon with further detail!"

So overall, Haweye 2 never quite managed to grace our screens back in 1989 like we had all hoped, but it does now look like we could finally be seeing the game in some shape/form, and we have the original 1989 concepts as an added bonus!

A stunning sequel promised, unfortunately never delivered…

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 4 Comments

Hawk

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

A strange little preview by Thomas Miegel, involving somekind of space craft doing duties over various landscapes.

HAWK is based on INTENSITY by Andrew Braybrook – the aim is to rescue people. You control one vehicle, press fire to land somewhere and then the other vehicle moves to that point – but don’t collide with it!

The preview comes with a few levels, including a screenshot of a later level which is unplayable.

There is a fair amount actually in the preview, to indicate that not too much work was needed to finish the game off. The levels are however not all linked together, and you will have to keep reloading to see each level.

Graphically quite good, with graphics typical of a late 80’s C64 game, and some good sonics. A little rough around the edges, but otherwise a promising looking preview.

The exact release details are currently non-existant, though credit names will hopefully lead to some more information being dug up on this game. Possibly to find a later version, or even a completed version. Can you help?

Nice things going on here…

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Haunted

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

After the success of Last Ninja series and Vendetta, System 3 were to take the old formula and use it in their next game, “Haunted”.

Similar in looks to Last Ninja, this game was a problem solving style game called. This was rumoured to be in the pipeline around the same time as Silly Putty and Fuzzball.

Never released, down possibly to the fact that Fuzzball and Putty were put on ice due to the demise of the C64, this probably suffered the same fate.

How far did this get before it was scrapped?… who was even working on this game?… Chances of finding the game are slim, as System 3 mostly had their staff store their work onto PDS, which has probably been wiped a long time ago.

 

Mark Cale confirmed that the game was actually started, and was using the Last Ninja engine – like Vendetta did. Unfortunately the coders (who we don’t yet have names for) were not quite up to the job and the game was scrapped.

We hope to find out more soon, about how far it got and if anything can be saved!

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 1 Comment

Hard Drivin’ V2

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

As the C64GS was in full flow, companies started to put their support into the machine by listing various titles they planned to have ported for the cartridge format.

Domark was one such publisher, and they were also planning an update of the dismal Hard Drivin’ on cartridge… taking advantage of the loading speeds which would be available.

It is not known exactly if the game would have been recoded, but it would have needed something quite drastic to improve on the original. But it is possible to create something better, especially when you look at Battle Command which later came out from Ocean.

GTW knows that Chris West was behind most (if not all) of the mastering of Domark’s cartridges, so questions will be sent along to Chris to hopefully answer soon.

Did anything ever get started, or was this quickly dumped for Race Drivin’ to be given focus?

More research needed…

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Hard Drivin’ V1

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

Another early version it seems existed of another Domark game, this time of the terrible Hard Drivin’ game conversion being worked on. Just how did the Spectrum receive a fantastic conversion, and we get this game? (The game was so bad that it didn’t get a full release on its own – only through compilation and budget).

Zzap in 1990 had the screenshot you can see below which depicted a very slightly more colourful conversion.

The artist behind the loading picture confirmed to GTW64 that the above screenshot from Zzap was infact an earlier version of the released game, but there was also an earlier version of Hard Drivin’ being done by a completely different programmer (who we believe to have been someone at Binary Design). The developer hit a lot of troubles trying to get the game finished – though apparently not that much was actually running, so they gave up and called it quits (Never to work for Domark again). This left Domark with no game, and so they drafted someone else in quickly to finish things.

However, advertising had already been spent we assume and there was a deadline. In typical “Total Recall” fashion, the developer had just two weeks to get it complete, and from scratch! The team was not given any code or assets to work with, the new team started from scratch.

The panel you see in the screenshot is an earlier staged version of the panel graphics by Andrew McCarthy, which were then changed later to a final version with hi-res elements. Apparently this version was running actually at a decent framerate (believed to be around twice the speed of the final game) with both tracks included. The problem came when the other cars on the track were introducted, which really caused issues – of which there was no time to solve as Domark was desperate to release the game.

The artist behind the loading screen felt that the second developer got the shitty end of the stick trying to do a complex game from scratch in two weeks. But he was young and eager and should not of taken it on. Sadly he no longer works in the industry and left in 2000 after being messed around by publishers, ridiculous requests, lack of regular funding and ever changing schedules.

Overall this now explains why Hard Drivin’ which we all know on the C64 turned out like it did. It was not the result of lazy programming, but a developer up against it and with a silly deadline to work to.

Sure, had the developer had more time – it may have still been an average conversion, but we may have had something more like the Spectrum version (just lacking on speed). Maybe we have been a little harsh over the years therefore without knowing the full picture until now? The game’s loading screen artist was very surprised that Domark even bothered to release it.

Now the hunt is on to try and find out the original developer of the earlier version and see if anything remains of this version – but also maybe of this slightly better looking version of the second developed game. Has either survived after all this time though?…

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 4 Comments

Hangman Deluxe

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

Not too much to say about this preview, apart from that its Hangman, and not really a good one at that.

There is no hangman sprite to indicate how many lives you have, just a flashy little logo at the top and a horrible red main screen to type letters into.

If you like Hangman, then you may enjoy this one, and its got plenty of words to keep you going for a little while. I prefered the version that Commodore gave away with their Introduction To Basic pack back in 1982! :)

Thanks to Gaz Spence, we can confirm that the game has surfaced in its full form on Gamebase 64 and can be grabbed from here: http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=3400&d=18&h=0

Case closed!

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 2 Comments

Hands Of Stone

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Yet another Beyond Belief game which was planned and mentioned in the interview with Jim Scott.

Information is a bit scarce, as all we currently know is that the game was to be a Double Dragon style beat ’em up with weapons (Baseball bats, boxes etc).
However there was not going to be a two player option according to the write up.

Well, the Spectrum version at least seemed to be coming along very well, and the game was even reviewed. It got a respectable 70%, but the game never surfaced sadly. We guess because Beyond Belief went under.

Contact has been made with Jim Scott, but sadly we have not heard anything back just yet. Hopefully soon we will hear back and find some information based on this game and the others.

So for now we have no credits for the game, so hopefully someone will step forward for it.

More research needed…

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