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.

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Elysium

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Elysium was to be a game to match the class of Ultimate’s Knightlore and Alien 8 games on the C64, using some rather cool programming techniques to get everything running to speed.

The developer had finished Imhotep, and started working on the game – without telling Ultimate at the time. You can see a very brief glimpse in the photo, but this could be all you ever see…

The game only reached the very beginnings of life, and eventually could well have been an Ultimate game in every way possible had it been completed.

Tim Stamper however (who didn’t know about the game) was trying to push the developer into producing games on the Spectrum, and the developer felt that the spectrum was a step backwards. He didn’t like the way Ultimate was thinking, and decided to part ways. As a result, the Ultimate styled game was never to see the light of day.

Sadly, the developer was not to keep hold of his work disks… so the remains could well be lost forever now. A huge
shame, as we could have potentially seen a game which proved that games like Alien 8 could work at good speed on a C64. We sadly don’t know much else about the game – no storyline as the game never really progressed that far.

Check out the photos though of the developer working on his long lost work… Shot is a close up showing development on Elysium.

We will keep this case open, but it’s one which is very hopeful to find… almost vapourware now…

Can anything be found, or is it case closed?…

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Dynamite Dan 2

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Originally mentioned in CVG as a new game being produced on the Spectrum and C64, Dr Blitzen and the Islands of Arcanum was on its way. This is better known as Dynamite Dan II, and was eventually released on the Spectrum, but sadly not the C64 for
reasons currently unknown.

Dynamite Dan was released on the C64, which begs the question why the C64 version was not done. It seems there was most likely problems with the development of the C64 version, and Mirrorsoft had no choice but to cancel the game.

Of course we don’t know just yet, so we need to do a lot more research. It is possible the game would have been coded by the same people who did the first game. Of course, this needs to be confirmed.

For a game which I feel could have been easily converted to the C64, i’m very interested to find out what happened
to our C64 version.

Does anyone out there know what happened?…. Let us know! :-)

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Dynablaster

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

A very famous game worldwide, featuring up to 4 players who go around and simply bomb each other. Even almost banned by some countries, including Ireland who condemned the idea after saying that kids could be encouraged to blow each other up. In the end, it was only the control pads that blew up after constant playing.

The Dynablaster (More well known as Bomberman around the world) revolution was widely spread, and was planned for the C64 back in 1991/92 by Ubi-Soft (Or Hudson Soft Germany). There were brief mentions in the pages of Commodore Format, but nothing was ever seen again on the title, apart from the annoying blip on the scanner which never seemed to move any closer to the center.

Nothing could be found, until recently on the Lemon forum, it was brought to the attention of other sceners about the possibility of Dynablaster being on the C64, and they submitted an Advert which mentions the C64 as one of 3 machines being catered for. (But no Spectrum or Amstrad versions were mentioned).

Not a lot to go on, but it showed certainly that Ubi-soft had their sights set on a C64 conversion being done. Just how far the conversion got was unknown. Then suddenly Dominic Bode brought to GTW’s attention some crucial information which gave the credits above… Mathias Reichert (Code) and Alexander Meyer (Graphics) were linked as the developers. Not fully confirmed at that point, but it was a start…

Part of the mystery deepened when it was found that Mighty Brain in Commodore Format answered a question in around 1992/93 about the game’s whereabouts and said that it suffered “distribution problems”. Of course, Mighty Brain was the task of one of the staff members each month… It seems that this wasn’t the case anyway… Read on…

Now the plot begins to thicken, and a story evolves…. Just recently, Karl Kuras kindly informed GTW that some C64 screenshots were printed in a German magazine called “Play Time”. After a request, Pohli from the Lemon 64 forum had kindly dug up the shots from the magazine with help from a neighbour and now GTW can show what the game was looking like on the C64. This confirmed that GTW are now officially searching for a C64 conversion… and possibly one which is nearly complete.

Well, research from another GTW reader (Hank, in the forums) brought the interesting possibility that the music was in fact in HVSC. Looking under Various/Remo… and dated 1991/1992 Hudson Soft, could it be? Was Sven Appel the official musician for the game? GTW attempted to find out and we managed to get in touch with Sven, who confirmed that these were indeed for the official conversion by Hudson Soft Germany. All credits have now been also confirmed!

Sven tells GTW…

“Well, i can tell you that this conversion was never released. I made the music conversion and lots of sprite graphics. The two player battle mode was almost finished. But the game was never released. We made it for Hudson Soft Germany. I don’t have any code left. Only musics and graphics.”

Expanding on this, we asked Sven about the possibility of digging out the graphics, which he has agreed to do in the future. There isn’t anything playable, but could that be next? We still need to track down Matthias, which is proving tricky so far. But at the very least we could be seeing a slideshow of how the game looked.

The game was confirmed as incomplete, and was cancelled due to the dwindling C64 market, which Hudson Soft Germany saw and decided to act on. They concentrated on the Amiga version, which did get released in time. The C64 version is sadly still mentioned in the manual and on the back cover (as being a 3 player max game). It is a tease of what could have been had the game been completed a bit quicker perhaps.

So… GTW is looking now for a game which was around 70% complete we believe. Screenshots show that it looks playable at least, and we now have something to search for… thanks to all those involved in researching for this game though!…

Will it be found?… Time will tell…

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 3 Comments

Deluxe Strip Poker

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

A graphically impressive strip poker game, with some artwork which puts Cover Girl and Sam Fox Strip Poker right into the shade.

Very proffesionally created, this game was mean’t for release by mail order.

Featuring a impressive set of developers working on the game, the game had everything it could wish for.

For unknown reasons, this was not enough and the game never got any further to a completed stage for release.

Contacting the people to the left will establish exactly what happened.

Get a good gawk at those nawks!…

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Dwarfs And Diamonds

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

A very quick and new entry thanks to a recent release by Onslaught with a Demo compilation pack.

Dwarfs and Diamonds was one of those games on the pack, and is a pretty neat looking Bubble Bobble/Bombjack styled clone with some excellent graphics and a hi-res overlaid sprite.

Sadly it seems once you’ve killed everything and got all the diamonds, you can’t do much else, but its a nice promising glimpse of the game.

Now just what happened to it, and who it was being developed by is another question. We’re not completely sure, so we need some credits and any details. Do you know more?

Early days for this one!…

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Dungeons Of Death

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: , last updated: by Alex Ross-Shaw

Back in the 1980s there were innumerable indie publishers of the kind so rightly lauded in today’s mobile and online gaming market. Just as today all you need to become a developer is a single app on a marketplace, in the 1980s you just needed a game and an address to set up a mail order service. As you can imagine in the pre-internet days these kinds of publishers and developers sprung up only to vanish without a trace and so they often pop up today as some of our hardest to recover ‘games that weren’t’.

Aardvark Ltd is one such publisher. It was created as an outlet for Rodger Olsen, who had taken to writing games for his children and decided to make some of the money back that he’d spent on computers by selling them across the TRS-80, C64 and Vic-20 platforms in the USA.

Numerous titles were published including a couple of dungeon romps based on 1st edition Dungeons & Dragons rules called Dungeons of Magdarr and Search for Magdarr. The latter was a revised and re-released version of the former, but it turns out there was also a version that existed prior to either of those games.

The game is advertised as allowing you to go on a “dungeon exploring quest” with up to six players with a choice of race and characters and had a fifteen page manual included. Presuming it is going to be similar to Dungeons of Magdarr if not identical then it plays pretty much as a typical RPG ala Dungeon Master, albeit more primitive due to the era it was released in.

Dungeons of Death, with different artwork to Dungeons of Magdarr, was advertised along with numerous other games for the Commodore 64 like Zeus, Seawolfe and Quest but today there is little evidence it ever existed except as an appearance on a ‘for trade’ list on a TRS-80 website.

So we know a TRS-80 version exists, but what about the C64 and Vic-20?

Well as luck would have it a Vic-20 version of Dungeons of Death turned up recently in the US and has been checked out to see what differences, if any, it has with Dungeons of/Search for Magdarr. The differences between the three games seem slight but it looks like the Vic-20 version lacked the 3D graphics that the later games had on the C64. Of course there is no way of knowing if the C64 version of ‘Dungeons of Death’ had 3D graphics like ‘Dungeons of Magdarr’ and ‘Search for Magdarr’ but it does seem likely.

Today Rodger Olsen publishes science-fiction novels on Great Authors Online, which he also runs and edits and we have tried to make contact with him through that website. We have also tried to track down the mystery person who received the TRS-80 bundle off the for-trade list in an attempt to discern what differences, if any that Dungeons of Death had with Dungeons of Magdarr.

Hopefully one or both of these avenues will yield some information and we can update this entry.

In August 2020, a poster on AtariAge by the name of Ron Cooke came forward with an original copy of the game that they had brought back in the day. They had originally ordered DOD from a computer magazine called BITD, and it arrived with no packaging – just a manual. Recently he wanted to see if it could get DOD running on his newly purchased C64Mini, and this was when the efforts to preserve began.

Ron kindly provided scans and right afterwards managed to get the game backed up to make available to all! It took 3 tape desks overall to get the game preserved, and thanks to Ron the game can now be fully downloaded.

Interestingly, just hours later – Hedning/Genesis Project got in touch to inform us that they had the disk version and had been going to spend time fixing up various bugs that were present. The game had been found and recovered by Black Beard. However, they have kindly provided the disk version for us to add to the site as a result of the tape version being recovered. The disk version had protection, though the tape version did not. So today we have both the tape and disk versions preserved, when it had been many years that we had neither!

Then in June 2022, contributor Tom in the comments had a letter from Aardvark in a recent Commodore pick up that stated “Due to the seemingly uncorrectable errors in Dungeons of Death, we are substituting a new and better Dungeons and Dragons type adventure. It is called Dungeons of Magdarr. We are sure you won’t be disappointed.”  So this confirms why Dungeons of Death had such a limited release.

Check out the downloads and see the game for yourself at long last! Case closed!

Notes:

Definitely released on the TRS-80:

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 17 Comments

Dungeons, Amethysts, Alchemists ‘n Everythin’

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

Dungeons, Amethysts, Alchemists ‘n Everythin’ was to be a simple text adventure created in GAC and converted from the Amstrad/Amiga/ST (Amiga we don’t think was GAC related) release of the same name. We have confirmation that a C64 version was in fact planned, and even Gamebase 64 have an entry which anticipates that a C64 version may have existed…

Apart from details about the actual game from other websites talking about the Amstrad/Spectrum versions, we know little about the C64 conversion or if anything was actually ever started. It seems odd that a simple GAC game would not have got completed or hit production troubles.

Thanks to contributor Strident, we learn that the game originated on the Amstrad CPC and was written by Richard Robinson, using GAC.  Barry Jones produced the Atari ST port using STAC (ST version of GAC) and Justin Leck was responsible for the Amiga version. The ZX Spectrum version is still at large.

Strident confirms that the only other two mentions of the C64 version they have spotted are in the Adventurers Club Limited Dossier 23 & 24, in a news articles saying the game was coming to Spectrum & C64. Also in a review in the German publication ASM October 1987 (page 88) where it’s listed as one of the formats the game is available in.

The game itself was a typical adventure and described by some as being quite easy and for beginners. It is a bit silly in places and pokes fun at the adventure genre in general. There are also plenty of sexual innuendos throughout the game.

Still very much early days for this one, but here’s a rubberstamped GTW entry so we can find out just what happened to it…

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 6 Comments

Dungeon Master

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

A rather grey attempt at Dungeon Master on the C64, quite literally with its greyscale multicolour graphic mode.

This is an ambitious project to try and attempt on the commodore, but someone had the guts to have a try, and its not too bad really.

This preview doesn’t have much to look at, apart from some impressive rooms and moving. Everything seems fairly empty otherwise.

Inventory screens are all present too, and apart fromt the lack of colour, the conversion looked like it was going well from this preview.

Its unknown why the project got shelved, or how much further it got. Much more research is needed to establish these things in the future, then who knows what GTW will dig up.

A promising conversion…

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Dune 2

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

Don’t get too excited about this one. Its uncertain if this was meant to be, but Dune 2 may well have been planned for development at some stage on the C64. The static mock ups that we have here could well be a starting point of one, albeit an unofficial conversion.

Although there is no playable game, the two stills look rather good, and show some promise and excitement. But did it ever get past these mock up screens or was this all that was ever produced?

It is very likely that nothing was ever started, but we hope to hear from those behind the screens sometime to clarify. If you know anything more about it, please do get in touch.

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 3 Comments

Duel

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

A game which has been found out about thanks to information from Darren Melbourne.

Duel is a split screen shooter which featured tons of parallax scrolling and special effects throughout. It was to be a combat game where you are pitted against an opponent/second player ship.

Programmer was none other than Finlay Munroe, who did many games on the C64, including many which never saw the light of day. Add this one to your list!

The game was actually completed, and was a lot of fun according to Darren (Who was the project manager). The game was to be published by Quicksilver, but sadly they went into administration just before the game could be published. For reasons currently unknown, the game never seems to have been pitched to anyone else, and so it remains as unreleased.

We hit a dead end when trying to contact Finlay to get the game, but in late 2011 – thanks to C64.com and Darren Melbourne – a selection of Darren’s disks were preserved, and Duel was recovered. There are slightly varying versions, but you will find a final version which was meant for a budget release.

It is a simple, but neat two player game – featuring some good graphics and titles. It isn’t mind blowing, but great to see this game finally preserved in its full form. Go check it out! (Thanks to Slator for the fixed files!)

Case closed!

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