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.
A quick entry until we get more info, but Atari Frog brought this game to our attention. Ubi Soft were advertising the game via a poster which was picked up at a show by Atari Frog and recently discovered.
It has screenshots from the ST and also C64, which we hope to be adding very soon once Atari Frog scans the poster in.
Watch this space, but do you know any more about this game?
One of our last games to focus on from Psytronik which never saw the light of day is Fighting Cops. This seems to be the 5th game in the series, following on from the other unreleased SEUCK “Cops” sequel, “Cops Fight Back” (Which is believed to be complete, and was a kind of Red Heat style of game – which we may see some day!)
This was mentioned in the same news snippet as CFB, so we assumed that this was therefore a new game being done. It was believed originally that it would be your typical SEUCK game with the usual standard from Alf, but actually it turns out it was rather different!
Fighting Cops was to be a one-on-one fighting game based on the series and a complete branch away from the SEUCK series. Alf produced a screen test/demo proposing the idea, and it basically had animated multi-sprite characters moving left and right and jumping on-screen. It featured 2 players and a few enemy characters that were supposed to punch and kick.
Alf couldn’t make the game obviously in SEUCK, so from Alf’s point of view it would be up to someone else to pick up the game. Had Psytronik taken off more at the time back in 1994, there is a good chance that the likes of Jon Wells or Jason Kelk could have picked up the idea and produced a game from Alf’s graphics, but sadly due to Psytronik disappearing early on, the idea of Alf’s was left to gather dust.
Where today Psytronik has risen from the ashes and the possibility of seeing Cops 4 – Cops Fight Back could well become a reality at long last, Fighting Cops may be another story. It is believed that Kenz may still have remains of the test demos which Alf did, so we could well see these some day soon!
A fighting shame this never quite made it
This is a title I first saw and my jaw dropped when I saw how great it looked. This was back in about 1993 and the magazine was Commodore Force, and they used to have a PD section which took a look at various demos and disk magazines. One particular disk magazine had a preview of "Fight For Freedom", which was the very game I talk about now.
This game was brought to my attention again by Richard Bayliss, who also saw the game in the same place. It seems this great looking little game never quite got finished.
It is a kind of "Wizard Of Wor" clone, with flash graphics and nice animations. However, from the preview.. things are lacking and maps are quite shallow to run around in. There doesn’t seem to be a great deal to do apart from shoot each other. By pressing some keys on the keyboard, you are able to select different weapons, including a sheild to reflect bullets away.
There seems to be some kind of Pacman style transporter in place, but its not working in the preview.
But was the game completed?… Well, sadly it wasn’t and all that remains it seems is to be about 4 levels and some unused graphics. Jazzcat recently fixed up some remains which were sent to him, which include some previously unseen graphics of the game’s loading screen and some other unused test graphics. This could possibly be it. There was sadly no music. Check out the download for the new additions.
Certainly, this seems to be a simple game made for a German Disk Magazine, which never got quite completed. A shame really. Hopefully we will hear more from Peter himself very soon.
More to come we hope…
In 2011, Richard Bayliss confirmed that this game was actually finished and released by 64’er, so this one can be closed!
http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=2708&d=18&h=0
Case closed!
From what sounds like a racing game, Fast ‘n’ Furious was infact to be a game based on whizzing across the screen on a magic carpet, where you would have obstacles and monsters to avoid like crazy. The game only seems to have surfaced on the Spectrum… http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0001734 … and was part of a double pack with ‘Thunderceptor’ which also was not released on the C64.
Both games were created by Ernieware, who produced Split Personalities for Domark.
On the first level you simply have to deliver some goods across the desert at very fast speeds whilst avoiding various creatures and baddies. On the subsequent levels the deliveries disappear and you have to do battle with deadly dragons.
It overall got average marks and the main critism was that the games were simply not addictive enough. They looked good, but just didn’t play particularly well. So were we spared from some pain maybe?… Well, consideirng US Gold released a lot of tripe, they would have released this i’m sure had it been finished.
The funny thing is that we do not for certain know if this was to be a C64 release… there has only ever been a very small mention… so did US Gold/Go even consider doing a C64 double pack?
Lots more research needed on this one, but we hope to bring you more on it soon!…
Delve deep into the age of fantasy with a host of intriguing characters that may help or hinder your exploration of this dream world.
Retrieve the magnificent Fantasia Diamond recently stolen and rescue Boris the master spy from the imposing fortress and its evil guardian. Talk to the Robot, Violinist and other characters to illicit their help. An enthralling and sophisticated graphic adventure by Kim Topley for the Spectrum 48k, Commodore 64, BBC Model B* and Acorn Electron SRP £7.95.
Despite Hewson Consultants Ltd releasing games prolifically on both the Spectrum and Commodore, little is known about Fantasia Diamond, a text adventure written by Kim Topley. It managed to find its way out on the Spectrum, as did another Kim Topley game, Quest Adventure. Looking at the adverts for the game, viewable from the Fantasia Diamond entry on World of Spectrum, it was a typically Tolkien-esque style fantasy game.
It’s hard to imagine why the game wouldn’t have been released on the C64, simply because Hewson were so prolific releasing games on both systems. Kim Topley wrote no other games, but has now written several widely available books on Java. Given the popularity of The Hobbit, which had come out two years earlier in 1982, it’s even harder to understand why the game wasn’t released on as many formats as possible.
Well, Kim Topley kindly got in touch with GTW and tells us that there was no C64 version simply because he didn’t own one…
"In your page about my game, Fantasia Diamond, you ask why it didn’t appear for the C64 and in other formats. The answer to your question is simply that I didn’t own a C64 at the time. The game was written first for the ZX Spectrum and then ported, by me, to the Electron and then the Amstrad CPC 464."
Kim finished the game masters and passed them to Hewson for publication. When asked about the possibility of a C64 conversion being done by someone else, Kim responded:
"I had the only copy of the source code for both my games. At the time, Hewson did not have any in-house programmers who could have done that work, although they did build a team shortly afterward. In fact, they offered me a job as leader of that team, but I decided that my position as a senior programmer at ICL in West Gorton, Manchester, was more secure and I was later proved to be correct."
What with possibly low sales of the game, Hewson may have decided to let the C64 conversion go. It seems that this was a non-starter sadly!…
Case closed!
I was a big fan of the Famous Five adventure based on the first book since Amstrad Action gave it away on their covertape and was dismayed when I found out it was just a one-off. So I thought I’d create another one. Logic told me I should use the second adventure as the basis for it although I wasn’t too keen on the story.
The first thing I did was to program the Kirrin Cottage locations into GAC for the game – I cheated and used the map from the first Famous Five game but I added a room or two. I also added a simple way to discover the Secret Way in one of the rooms and I think one of the last locations I created was the start of a lengthy tunnel.
Work was scrapped on this after a month of work, due to lack of intrest and the only remaining back-up was stored away.
However, last year, our apartment in Venice flooded and caused a lot of damage valued at thousands of pounds. Last week, we were given a small box of items salvaged by the contractors (who only just got round to returning them to us) and in the box along with damaged baby photos and stuff were a pile of 3.5″ discs.
Most were unlabeled, some were marked ‘Emma baby photos backup” and one wet, damp label read: “Five Go Adventuring Again. C64 emulator backup”.
I stuck this disc in my old desktop machine but it wouldn’t work properly so I pulled a few favours and got a friend of mine to have a look. Also by coincidence, I found my original notes including what I had done with the project.
Sadly the disks didn’t work, so this game is now lost forever. Someday the original notes may get added to this entry, but otherwise it is…
Case closed…
You probably won’t be too surprised to learn that Fairlight 2 was due for the C64 as well as the other platforms. The people who confirm this are The Games Machine, who mention in the Spectrum review that the C64 conversion was coming soon.
As you well know, it sadly never quite happened and Fairlight 2 never surfaced on the C64 as intended. One thing we don’t know is if the game was actually started for conversion and infact if there were problems with it being converted too.
Trevor Inns had the task of porting the original version across with good success, so was he to do the sequel too?… Well, Trevor confirms he did not, but we are now in touch with the man behind The Edge, and hope to find out more very soon.
The Games Machine (issue 1, page 127) gives some info stating it was to be a 2 parter – with the C64 version released as a twin pack as “Fairlight The Legend” back to back with the original. Of course this never happened in the end!
For now, you can check out the Spectrum conversion for a good indication of what the game would have been like. It no doubt would have been a straight spectrum port like the original anyway.
More soon on this conversion we hope!…
When I originally downloaded this unfinished title, I was thinking “This can’t be the same Fade To Black that I played many years ago on my PC?”… And of course, it wasn’t… Not a 3D based game, but a RPG.
This RPG is in a very early stage, with nothing much working apart from a simple map which can be scrolled around in a little window.
There is no linked background or story to this game, but a few credits and that is all. Jon Mines recently got in touch via the comments and detailed that the preview was released by NTSC64.com, pretty much like a cover disk release. It seems that interest was lost in the game’s development.
There was nothing really more to the game, and nothing else will come of the game. Jon has suggested that maybe in the future, the work disks could be released. If that is the case, then we’ll be sure to put them here with Jon’s permission.
Fuzzball is another classic GTW case. A great platform game, in which a two level preview (Featuring level one and level 16) was released to the readers of Commodore Format on issue 24. Unfortunately it was to be the Amiga version that was only to see the light of day.
Fuzzball had you controlling a blue fuzzball which had to kill all of the other fuzzballs in the 50 big levels for you to be turned back into a human. The game looks great, and plays the same with effective squiging sfx and music by Jeroen Tel..
Its very addictive and would have been something to keep gamers happy. Unfortunately it was never to be.
The game was completed but System 3 pulled out of the C64 market at the same time it was completed. They decided not to take a final risk by releasing Fuzzball.
Another version of events originally depicted that Miles Barry (the programmer) was not paid for his efforts and was dragged onto coding the SNES version of “Putty Squad” as compensation for lost wages. This has been clarified as being incorrect and what happened infact was that Miles had to go back to Prism to write Football Manager 3 and was threatened with legal action if he didn’t. It is possible that this may have just been before the game’s completion and pushed System 3’s decision to let the game go.
According to sources, Miles doesn’t have a complete version of the game, as it was on the PDS system at System 3. Either this has been possibly wiped or hoarded (though rumours are that System 3 have kept everything). Possibilities of a full version in existence still, is quite remote, but not unproven. There were some developments where there was a final hope of the game being uncovered, with a system being found… but it was found not to have anything of Fuzzball, and to this day its believed that it only ever remained on System 3’s PC based SNASM system.
We found out in recent times that actually Jed Adams took over the graphical development of the game in the later stages. It started out as a title that both Miles Barry and Robin Levy worked on. When Robin lost interest in the project, Miles brought Jed in to continue the work. Jed redid all of the graphics, all of which you can find in the CF preview (Robin’s graphics were not used as far as we know). Jed completed all his graphic work on the game, but its not 100% known if the game was fully finished by Miles before it was scrapped. It’s believed that there is no reason to say otherwise.
Recently added are two rare screenshots from Commodore Format, of another level which was not present in the preview on the covermount. We did think that maybe System 3 locked this level away and it could still be in memory, but sadly not it seems… we couldn’t find any trace of this other level in this form…
However… we found these sprites tucked away!….
After chatting again to Jed Adams, he suggested there might be more of the game’s assets hidden away in the demo that was hidden. So we posted a question on Lemon64 to anyone technical enough to have a look. Forum member ‘Loflo’ found that at location $0B23, you could change it to LDA #$XX, with XX being any value from 00 to 10 in Hex, and starting the game with G0400 in monitor. This would start you on a level from 1-17.
Before you get too excited, sadly there are not another 15 levels waiting to be explored, but there are remains of them!… Level 5 features the above creature running around, Level 6 features the same sprite patterns as those in the CF screenshot. The enemy data is there, but the graphic/map data seems to be missing (Until we get further confirmation). However, its a slightly larger glimpse of the game, some screens we’ve added to the shots page. Additionally poking around the game’s sprites, we found a flying bird that was unused, a bouncing bubble and a creature very similar to the above one we found, which we found running around on level 5! (LDA #$04).
We heard rumours that Jeroen Tel had composed more music for the game than what was in the preview. After getting in touch in late 2012, Jeroen confirmed that he did and passed GTW64 on the source files to Level 2, Title and High Score tunes he had composed and which were not used! You can now hear these for yourself for the very first time! And they are pretty neat too! (Thanks to Mikael Backlund for helping compile them!)
But what of the full game itself?… Well, the only chance it seems of ever getting hold of a full version will be to confront and ask Mark Cale himself, but will he allow a release?…
Well, we may not need to rely on this – as Mikael asked GTW64 to hold back on the music initially as they wanted to surprise you a little more with a little more than just extra tunes found.
Literally at the death, Mikael Backlund caught wind that we had located the tunes, asked us to hold back as there was opportunity to share something a little bigger with you. Mikael and his team have spent the last 10 years taking the Fuzzball preview apart and reconstructing it. They have reconstructed and built a new unseen Level 2 with Jeroen’s unreleased level 2 music in place!
It is a huge surprise, and it is a significant development – as it shows the potential that this game could some day be actually finished! Jeroen’s musical gift has helped also establish how the music/sfx plugged into the game properly. We really hope that eventually we see more! Watch this space!
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