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.
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!
Marco (Exile) and Peter Weighill had both been helping GTW with various scans, when they came across a rather interesting finding inside a game cover, and in a magazine respectively.
Fungus 2 was indeed in production on the C64, and was stated as “Coming Soon” by one of the Players released games in the inlay. A screenshot was also given of the loading screen, which can be seen here. Computer and Video Games mentioned the game back in issue 80, and showed also the same loading screen. There were no in game screenshots. Not sure if these ever existed, often loading screens were done first in certain cases.
Thanks to contact with Karl Hörnell, we found out a lot more about the game, confirmed as unreleased. The game was a hugely souped-up version of the original game with many gameplay and graphical improvements. Essentially this was to be one heck of a sequel. There is too much to mention, but you can check out exactly what the game was about by reading Karl’s own account about the game in the Creator Speaks section.
Essentially Karl’s C64 broke down just as the game was nearing completion, and Karl found it too expensive to get another machine. So he sent Interceptor a 99.5% complete version of the game with some bugs that needed fixing. Karl had hoped someone from Players would have sat down at fixed it, then released the game. But strangely no-one did, and to this day the game remains unreleased.
BUT… Karl sent us a disk which read “Fungus 2 – Work Disk”. Upon this disk was indeed the last remaining copy of the game! We were finally able to present you with the full game to enjoy for the first time many years ago.
In the download is the original game, as well as an alternate version which I loaded with a different Charset… and it gives a different set of levels by the looks of things. We need to ask Karl more about this!
In 2009, Andrew Fisher resurrected the inlay advert and scanned it in for us. Here it is here… Inlay scan.
Then in 2021, Bitmap Soft have worked with Karl to produce a physical release of the game for the first time over at https://www.bitmapsoft.co.uk/product/fungus-ii/ (At the time of writing, August 2021, it is pre-order).
It was a graphic adventure game created using GAC for all the 8-bit machines. It was based on an 2000 draft of a sci-fi book series which sees humanity surviving in the 23rd century. The heroes are six random people who timejumped from the 20th century thanks to technology from the 23rd.
The game would have centered around the storyline of Book 7 – Shadows in the Dark. The Confederation are mining on an empty planet but there are a series of mysterious deaths – on examination of the bodies reveals they were killed by a savage animal, but nothing can be seen of it at all.
As Commander Gareth Mason, you have to help the rest of your crew survive while they get the vital ore required for the war and if you get the chance, destroy the creature.
This game was not quite completed, but has been salvaged from a work disk and released for the first time. This segment of the game was set in the Confederation spaceship and was mean’t to be a test layout of the rooms. You can now download this very early adventure game.
Additionally you can download the Spectrum version from World of Spectrum, and Patrick may finish the game one day – who knows!
A great little game which never really seemed to fit into the category it was placed under. The game strangely was situated within Binary Zone PD on one of their PD games disks. A game of commercial quality and addictive platform playability was being given away for free?
A mistake surely, but sadly not. This hard work was the creation of both Kevin Murphy and Damian Steele whom created the game with the hope of finding a publisher. Along with other titles that Kevin had written, the Flubble and Squij was shown around to publishers such as Codemasters and Mastertronic, but sadly without too positive a response.
Commercially, the C64 was dying and it was down to the new breed of post bast C64 companies to save the day. Kevin, after publishing hell for this and his other titles, gave up on the C64 and moved on. Pretty peeved over the way his quality work never made it in the shops.
Music was just temporary from Ubik’s Music, and they were due to get a set of tunes. Sadly they were let down by the musician who was meant to be supplying some tunes. We’re not sure who that was exactly! The intention was never to sell the game with the Ubik Music within though – unless it was credited accordingly.
Kevin worked on Flubble and Squij with his friend Damian Steele, popular for his adventure games he wrote for The Guild (Or later merged as Binary Zone PD). Damian carried out creation and design of levels, as well as thoroughly testing everything. The game levels were built up using a level editor developed by Kevin. After Kevin became disollusioned with the game, Damian pushed it over to Jason Mackenzie over at Binary Zone PD (and then at the time Psytronik in its first guise). Damian has very kindly added to the Creator Speaks section to give his story on the game.
Jason must have been impressed when Damian sent him this game, and Jon Wells was set to work to tidy the game up and add some extra presentation. Commodore Force reported Flubble and Squij as one of Psytronik’s new titles.
Music currently in the game (Taken from Ubik’s Music) was to be replaced by a set of tunes by Feekzoid. So with Jon’s additional work and Feekzoid’s added music, the game was about to become even more special.
Just why it never got released on Psytronik’s label is still a mystery. According to Kenz, Jon did tweak with the game, and there exists a modified version which Kenz has kindly dug out for GTW to present to you for the first time ever. The new version 2 contains some improvements to the sprites, and also features colour splits over the background graphics. There is also new bizarre and unheard Feekzoid music in the main game itself, and on the title screen (Which is in HVSC).
Eventually the game was placed into PD and was a prominent feature of many of Binary Zone’s game compilation disks/tapes. Although the game won many fans, it was always questioned why a game of this quality managed to end up in PD, but sadly that was the way it was. But Kenz was to finally lay an old ghost to rest when the game was finally released on the Psytronik relaunched label in 2013 to mark the 20th anniversary. As a result you can now purchase the game as intended from here.
Kenz in 2013 told the story about what happened to the game, which can be found under the Articles tab or via the original blog post here.
Why did this never get snapped up by a budget label?…
A new addition to GTW by Gremlin Graphics, which was never heard about until now. Pete Dabbs has brought to our attention a game called Flonk, where you control a green mutant frog like creature, similar to that of Gribbly.
The game was set in a 64 x 64 x 64 cube and consisted of “Lilly” type pads spread in front of the players. The players would hop around on a pseudo-3D rotatable world made up of these lily pads and you would have to bounce around on these pads while avoiding traps and nasties, and creating bridges to get around. To kill enemies, you had some kind of limited weapon (Not clear what it was).
The game was split vertically into two screens for a two player mode, where you could chase each other to frag each other whilst avoiding the puzzle elements in the game.
This is currently all we know about the game itself, though Pete, Paul and Richie all give excellent details about the game which you can read in Creators Speak. Pete informs GTW that the game would have been really good had it been finished. It was being developed by none other than Esprit Software, and was designed by one of the Sharla developers Paul Crawley.
The game was being developed for Gremlin, and when Paul and Ritchie went to work at Gremlin, supposedly to finish off Flonk, they were then moved onto other projects, and Flonk never got finished as a result.
The possiblity of finding the game is there, with chance that Richie might be able to find some disks – but the PC based ones had deterioated when checked. Paul moved to the US in 1996 and feels he very likely has nothing of the game any longer.
Pete himself did actually find a build of the game, but a very early build – which you can view on YouTube. It is hoped that we will be able to add something of the game soon to the site, but possibly a later version with characters in place too. At this stage, this is an early technical demo.
Finger crossed, we might actually see something of this title one day!
In the early 90’s, the 16-bits were greeted by a new style of adventure game with a character not far off from that of Impossible Mission. Another World and Flashback by Delphine were two of the biggest breakthrough’s of their time, with amazing animations and interluding sequences. It was the shape of the future.
Never in a million years would you think that it would make the C64, but Russ Michaels thought otherwise. With the amount of C64 upgrades available from CMD in America, and with the hope that people in the UK would buy this hardware, a game like Flashback was thought a lot more possible, even its animated sequences. But even the game was planned for standard C64’s, without the video footage.
This ambitious project would require a Ramcard/Ramlink to be played, due to the video footage in the game. The game would therefore remain faithful to the other 16-bit incarnations, featuring all the levels, animations, soundtracks, cut-scenes. After seeing Vermes’ Another World style intro in a standard C64, it was not hard to see the possibilities of it being a reality.
Russ Michaels pushed out his idea to the C64 UK public, releasing a small two screen slideshow to the subscribers of Commodore World magazine who received the free disk with each issue. Russ gave the option for people to pre-order the game for around £12.99. If enough people showed interest, the project would go ahead.
Unfortunately with no pre-orders received, the game plan was scrapped. Leaving remains of just a slideshow to get people dreaming. After talking to Russ, it seems that a little more was done than just two screens. In fact, pretty much of the first level was ported over and most of the character animations and collision detections were complete. All graphics were ported from the Amiga, and required some heavy tidying up, which Russ did for the majority of images (Including those in the slideshow).
Russ unfortunately gave all his disks away, though one person who did obtain some of the disks is currently looking to see if they have anything. Recently though a slideshow was recovered thanks to Kevin Tilley, which includes another Flashback convert screen.
Fears of darkness was the result of a budding programmer at the age of 18 wishing to produce a "Turrican-esq" game. 64er magazine had released Manfred Trenz’s Katakis Development System which was to be the inspiration for Falk to get programming Fears of Darkness.
Coding was carried out and also the graphic work too, right up until 1994. Falk sent the preview version to a guy in Fulda who mentioned that he would like to help him release the game when its finished. It seems that he just crack released it instead.
Still – Falk continued with the game and added various features (Some of which can be read about in "Creator Speaks"). The game music just contained some quickly ripped music from Last Ninja 2. However, due to the C64 dying out and other various bits and pieces, Falk decided to call time on the project and it was cancelled in late 1994. A shame, because the preview is very promising and this would have been a very well recieved game had it been finished and released.
We hope to get hold of some more remains of the game up until cancellation from Falk in the future, but for now check out this very promising preview and the Creator Speaks page…
Eye 2 Eye was a simple game which was started in 1993 and sadly never finished.
The game was a simple shooter with two people flying on a single screen and having to kill each other. Pretty much a glossy version of Atari’s "Combat".
It certainly looks good, but it seems the developers got bored with the development and left it alone. We hope to find out a bit more background to the game, but for now here it is!
Some nice sprites and backdrops greet this game, which could possibly have done well on a commercial release. Unfortunately this was not to be.
The final version never got into the shops or anywhere else in a later form, so a preview is all that currently remains. No credits or anything are known, apart from it was created by a team called Magnetic Design. Does anyone know who they are?
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