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

Attack On Centralis

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

Tau Ceti was very well received, and received game of the year awards. Created by Pete Cooke on the Spectrum, John Twiddy was allocated the task of converting to the C64, which he did an
excellent job of.

Once complete, John really saw the potential in the game being extended, and tried to convince CRL to let him work on a new sequel called ‘Attack On Centralis’. John was convinced that he could use some techniques from Paul Woakes’ Encounter to speed up the game considerably and make something a lot better than the original.

CRL sadly turned down the idea, possibly because they knew that Pete was working on an official sequel and were waiting for that instead. It isn’t known how far John got with his sequel, or if he even started the game. No doubt that John probably had a
few test routines running which demonstrated what he could have done.

It would have been interesting to line this up against the official sequel which did well… but sadly we never saw the C64 version of that either. Check out the review to read more.

As with Academy, we need a lot of information on this title. Most of the information was taken from a conversation with Andrew Fisher and is a collaboration of information from various sources. Hopefully in the future we will be able to track down John
Twiddy and find out more.. though that is proving rather harder than we thought. Can anyone help us track down John and get us in touch?

More to come on this game we hope……

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 2 Comments

Escape

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

A big thanks to Witold Bryndza who gave us the heads up about this long lost Timsoft which recently had an article published with a download link at C&A Fan. This was a game developed by a team called Artcore for Timsoft.

This is a neat little flick screen platformer with some colourful graphics which sees you having to find around 13 special squares across the map to progress further, whilst avoiding a series of enemies such as bats, snakes and giant snails.

It seems this was another Timsoft title that was caught up in the demise of the C64 and hence never got a full release until now. Its unsure why it has taken so long to surface, but we are glad it now has.

Overall it’s not the most spectacular game we have played, and it can get a little boring and samey to play, but it is rare to find an unreleased title in such a complete state, and this is a good example to digitally preserve and share with others.

Rafal Kwasny has been in touch and will hopefully be shedding some more light on their game (as well as other Artcore titles) very soon. He’s currently dusting down his disks and is starting to find bits and pieces. More here soon, but the level editors were already online, so we’ve added this to the archive.

Go check it out and watch this space for more details…

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Erik The Destroyer

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

Crystal Software and Electronics were an ambitious software house trying to save the C64 gaming market back in 1997 with a large range of planned releases. Sadly it wasn’t to be, and as with other companies – it was found not to be a financially viable proposition to try and make money out of the C64.

Out of the newly planned titles was “Erik the Destroyer” a C128 game which was described in adverts as follows:

“This game will actually feature an existing person from our staff. This guy is called Erik and he has got some real Rambo aspirations. The game will incorporate a platform style beat’em up with many deadly monsters and mutants. Available late October 1997.”

“Fight through a fantasy world in this platform style game…. From a little criminal, Erik turned into a mad man, intent on getting out of baddy land and into our own through a trans-dimensional port hole!”

Fabrizio Bartoloni found reference in Commodore Scene issue #23 from December 1998, page 8 – that products including Erik The Destroyer were being handed over to Gala Publishing. This would link David Connolly as a potential lead for trying to find something of the game.

This is all we currently know about the game, so its early days and we hope to find out more soon about this one!

More research needed!

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Eradicator 3

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Following on from the SEUCK based Eradicator 2 which was due for release by CDU, Jason G. Doig was working on a faster paced bi-directional vertical shooter, but moved on to Amiga stuff before it was finished sadly. None of the game was done in SEUCK and was far more advanced than the previous game done in the tool.

As the SEUCK effort was called "Eradicator 2", technically this is called "Eradicator 3", but Jason was planning to release the game as just "Eradicator"… starting from the beginning as his previous two games never saw the light of day in the first place. This makes it a little confusing, but ah well! :)

Jason’s problem (In his own words) was that he was more interested in the technical side of making games, and to some extent, playing with graphics. Gameplay was often slapped together without much thought at all.

The game only got as far as a single incompletable level. Just how well it looked and played we’re not sure yet, but we are hopeful that Jason will be able to find something of it so we can put it up along with Eradicator 2. Early days yet!

More soon we hope!…

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Eradicator 2

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Eradicator 2 has been sitting on our Wanted list for some time now, but never had an entry in GTW until the game’s author came forward!

The game was advertised in the back pages on a CDU compilation disk under the name of "Eradicator". For some reason though the game was tagged with "2" though no first game seems to exist. It is possible that Jason did a much earlier version and redid everything with enhancements and bolted the 2 on the end to signify it was a second version.

This is an effort created in SEUCK, but was one of the very first efforts which had title enhancements. This particular game features a high score, a colourful title screen and other small features. The game itself is a very colourful and well designed effort which makes it one of the better SEUCK efforts seen created with the tool.

It is not quite known why CDU never properly released the game, but Jason mentions that he originally submitted the game back in 1989 and never heard anything back. However, CDU held onto it for many years without doing anything with it and later got in touch around 1990/91 to ask if they could use it on a compilation and offered money. Jason never sadly got paid, which suggests the compilation never got out the door. As a result the game has never surfaced until now thanks to Jason backing up his game for people to see.

Thanks to this game we learn of another sequel, and there could be an earlier version to find also. The 3rd game was not actually done in SEUCK, so those not fans of the tool may be interested to learn about this one!

Enjoy this solid SEUCK effort!…

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Epsilon

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

Our next GTW entry comes in the form of a Slapfight style vertical scrolling shoot-em-up which was being produced by Paul Hughes.

It was originally assumed to have been produced for Ocean, but we find that in fact the game was meant for Rainbird Software back in 1988. You’ll find out how in a bit.

The game name was criticised by Paul himself, and feels it was quite crap. Not sure if the game name would have been changed somewhere down the line. Epsilon has stuck ever since though.

The game never got fully completed, and it seems that Paul and Dawn got dragged onto other projects – meaning that this was shelved.

Paul gavs hope by stating that the game is most likely on a few ST disks in his parents attic, and once he gets a chance, he will be having a dig through and converting the remains for us to put out and show the world.

Recently we had confirmation from Paul that Dawn Drake did all the graphics, but sadly these were assumed lost when Dawn sold Paul’s C128 setup to Martin Holland who sadly passed away in 2003. Martin was thought to have had all of Dawn’s disks, but it seems there was a mis-communication. It was found in 2012 that Martin had borrowed some of Dawn’s disks to just test out until he found his own.

The disks were returned to Dawn, who when questioned about another game in the archives, mentioned she had a bundle of disks which GTW64 could take a look at. That we did, and we were very surprised to find some early builds of Epsilon.

One preview unfortunately would not start correctly – but Martin Pugh very kindly fixed things up, and the preview shows a slightly different build with Terra Cresta sprites. There is also a high score mode tucked away which they unlocked. You can check things out for yourself by downloading the previews here. We also added Paul’s source code that he added to his own site in 2018.

It is hoped that maybe some day we can find more of the game – especially as it is such a promising looking game. Graphically it feels superb in places, especially the hi-res ship version. Sonically it is strong, but just features test music by Jon Dunn at the moment, ripped from another Ocean game – seems to suit it well though!

More soon we very much hope for this one!

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 1 Comment

Enterprise

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

Another game for the archives, this time a title mentioned by Mat Allen, and a game by Melbourne House.

This game was briefly mentioned in some magazines and a few adverts were printed. The game actually surfaced on the Spectrum (http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0001636) and Amstrad and got reasonable to average reviews.

Enterprise is a kind of Elite clone of sorts, but lacking on a lot of the features of the great Firebird game and doesn’t look like it would have made a too painful translation to the C64. But for reasons still unknown, the game never made it anyway.

It is the classic tale on the C64 normally of games not making the transition as the C64 was a little on the crap side at doing vector based games (Without all the tricks that we see today). What is the betting that this is another casulty of the Vector game translation problem on the C64?

Well, we spoke to Tim Ansell, who confirms that he wrote 5 versions in total. His brother did the box/advert artwork. Tim wrote versions for the Amstrad CPC464, Spectrum, Atari 800, C64 and then PC (Tandy + EGA) in that exact order. He couldn’t recall why some of the versions never saw release. It is plausible that poor sales of the Amstrad/Spectrum editions meant that Melbourne House decided not to release the others?

We hope that maybe Tim will be able to find something of the C64 version, so that it can be preserved – but it means crucially that there is a full game to find some day! Lets hope it can be recovered before any media deteriorates too much.

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English Invaders

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

A quick entry, but this educational game was advertised early in 1984 in a few magazines as a list of games coming soon from Comm*Data / Channel Software.

At the time we knew little about the game or what happened to it, and wondered if it was the very same game that Rabbit Software released on the VIC 20.

Contributor Brandon Campbell confirmed that he had the C64 game and it was indeed the same as the VIC20 title, where you would see a word fly down and press V for Verb, N for Noun etc.

In 2021, contributor Allan Pinkerton very kindly passed on a copy which he produced from a tape back up.  Here it is fully preserved!

We hope to get the tape added soon, but it confirms that the title was indeed released, so its case closed!

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 13 Comments

Enforcer

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

A ace game, unofficially known as Katakis 2, with the programmer none other than Turrican god Manfred Trenz.

Packed to the brim with amazing power-ps, great backdrops, epic soundtracks and incredible parallax scrolling, it’s a real shame this one never made the shelves over here in the UK.

It is an amazing game…. just remember the Turrican 2 space levels, and this is what you get in more power and capability. Its stunning, and amoungst the greats of Armalyte and Lions Of The Universe… Its just a shame it never got a worldwide release to give it the recognition it deserves.

Although officially released by Double Density in Germany, all of Manfreds game’s were released in the UK (I think?), so in a way this feels like a lost game to the commercial C64 community.

Simply this game was intended as a final hurrah on the C64 by Manfred, as he worked on the back of various console projects. It made Manfred a little bit of money on a classic formula which was so successful in his previous shooters, and from the levels of Turrican 2.

Take time to enjoy this stunner…

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Enemy

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

Enemy or NME was a side scrolling shooter that was graphically awesome according to project manager Darren Melborne. This was a game to be based upon the R-Type inspired mechanical/organic style of the day the title featured great graphics and an outstanding multiplexar.

This particular game got to the demo stages and was looking rather cool, until for whatever reasons (still unknown), it was unreleased and scrapped at an early demo stage. The game according to Darren was being done for Nexus and was likely therefore canned when the company collapsed.

We have been speaking with the programmer, Stuart Cook and sadly doesn’t believe he has anything of the game – its also been well over 20 years and details about the game are very sketchy as memories begin to fade.

Could the remains be found? Well, as we wait to see if Stuart can find anything – we got processing some disks from Darren Melbourne in early December 2015 and found a loading screen, a very early rolling demo and a test sequence for the ship.

Here is also a concept loading screen done by Ned Langman that was recently dug out from his archives:

Concept artwork by Ned Langman

Certainly the game looks great – apart from the test sprites! But it sounds and feels like there is something far more complete out there. That was the last of Darren’s disks though, so it is looking to be down to Stuart now to find more!

Can Stuart dig out his lost gem?…

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