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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Cyborg

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

A nice looking flick screen adventure, where you control a Cyborg which roams around JSW style screens in full multicolour, collecting keys and opening various doors.

Around the time of the preview’s release, there were several of these games being done in this style. Unfortunatly only a few ever made it to the completed stage.

Cyborg never made it, and a shame really, as its not actually that bad. Music is good too, and overall gives us a promising little game to warm the hearts.

There is a possibility that the game was completed, and released on a magazine disk, but can anyone confirm this?

More research will hopefully dig up more…

Nice old style flick screen adventure…

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Cyborg

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

Cyborg is described by a C16 website as “A shooting extravaganza with a different twist. Two directional movement limits your chance to escape, increases your need for skill.”… http://plus4.emucamp.com/software/Cyborg

The game indeed was released on the C16, but a C64 version should have simultaneously surfaced, but never did for reasons unknown. Stephen Kellett confirms this, and we are not sure why Rino didn’t release it.

The game is quite enjoyable, and it would be pretty great to see a C64 conversion. Indeed it would be very much like the C16 version, but still it is something that needs preserving!

Stephen offers hope by saying that he may still have the C64 version somewhere. When he gets the chance, we may have something to show you some day!

More to come soon hopefully…

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Cyber Tank

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

According to Commodore User September 1988 in their PC Show 88 preview, Activision had secured the rights for Corland Technology’s Cyber Tank game.

We did a bit of research, and found it. At present hte game is not yet full emulated it seems, but seems to be a Battlezone/Thunderblade clone… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvZwBja4Sns

The Games Machine had reported that Mediagenic had the rights to the home conversion of the game, along with SNK’s Fighting Soccer. Both games were listed down for a 1989 release,but it was pointed out that Mediagenic had their hands full projects wise as it was.

Nothing else surfaced about the game, so we can only assume that it was vapourware.

Do you know any more?

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Cybershot

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

A sideways SEU, with some fair parallax scrolling.

The game is in its very early stages, with little to shoot or look at.

No other information is currently known of this game, or if it were ever complete. The game does not exist in full anywhere currently, so its assumed the game was never finished.

Later previews or parts are still to be discovered, as are the people behind the game.

Not bad for a start…

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Cyberdyne Warrior Intro

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

Now for something a little different for GTW, as this special entry is more a Intro That Weren’t than a Game That Wasn’t.

As you well know, the Rowlands were two famous C64 developers, creating the fab Creatures series and then going out with a bang with their 100% rated Mayhem In Monsterland game.

Before these games, Steve and John Rowlands had success with other titles such as Retrograde, and Cyberdyne Warrior. The latter hit some serious distribution problems, and pretty much it came out at the same time as Retrograde (The sequel) as a result.

Anyhow, the game DID come out – however, a little chunk of the game which didn’t quite make the final mastering, the introduction sequence and also a loading screen too. Why neither made it, we don’t yet know. The sequence and artwork has been sitting on a disk for years, until permission was granted from the Rowlands for the work to be added onto GTW.

It is a short but sweet introduction, featuring some nice graphics and animation. The main ship is awesome, and an indication of what was to come from the talents of Apex in those days. Your ship flies through space, slowing to land on the planet. It then lands deep underground, where the ship then rests. The Cyberdyne Warrior protagonist jumps out, and ends by jumping down into the underground while avoiding guarding droids.

There is no sound in the introduction, though maybe Steve has composed a piece which sits in HVSC that was mean’t for this?

Additionally in 2008, Jason (Kenz) Mackenzie has kindly dug out the unused loading screen too for the game, and this can be found in with the download!… Now we just need someone to patch everything together and release a 100% version!

We will try and find out why this never got mastered with the final game – we suspect it was a space issue or due to the issues with getting it published.

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Cyber Cop

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

“The Rebellion’s Over! Your Mission: Terminate the Rebels of Hollerith. Your Role: You are the latest in Cyborg Technology. You are… a Cyber Cop & The Rebels are Ready for You.”

That is the starting description of Cyber Cop, a rather obscure title from Pedersen Systems (who are funnily the company established by Roger Pedersen, who did other titles). We don’t know much about how the game was to play, but the advert continues to describe the game as follows:

  • Fast Action Arcade Adventure
  • Full Spectrum Colour Animation
  • 3-D Spritable Characters
  • Life-like Battle Environments
  • Plays in 3 domains: Atmospheric, Geosphere and Aquatic
  • Realistic Sound Effects
  • Quick Manual Response
  • Choice of Play Longevity VS Higher Point Scores

This is pretty much it… we have a scan for the advert, but nothing about the game itself really as of yet. We hope to find out more from Roger at some point in the future.

Thanks to LiqMatrix, we learn that the PC edition was saved – and on the MobyGames entry – it states that due to the PC version only selling 3000 copies, all other editions were never converted to other platforms. It isn’t clear if anything was ever actually started or not.

Do you know any more?

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 3 Comments

Cyber Attack

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

So this is where Drew (Terminus) Rodger got to.. After his musical exploits for Zeppelin and Virgin, Drew turned his attention to the games market as the scene dwindled away. At the time, Commodore Format featured a huge games explosion.

This was to be a cross between Doctor Who and Paradroid, planned to the delight of the scene (and Dave Golder!). It was a relief to see Drew back in the lime light after a spell at Zeppelin doing music for games such as Arnie 2, and who was known to be great at coding too after his impressive Terminus demo.

It was never quite known what happened with this game and the 2 others which were also in development.

However, thanks to Andrew Fisher, we got in touch with Andrew in 2013 and find that sadly the game never really got off the ground. The gameplay would have been influenced by the soldiers vs cybermen fight scenes in the Dr Who stories ‘Earthshock’ and ‘The Invasion’.

It could not be recalled if the game would have been 8-directional or vertical, but the game would have push scrolled. The paradroid reference Andrew felt referred to the player’s handicap of not being able to see around corners. Graphics were inspired by the tilted view point of 1984 arcade game Equites (which also inspired Andrew’s SEUCK effort Terravision).

Not much was done really apart from a few test graphics and an animating Cyberman head which was to be downgraded to the C64. It is believed that no code ever existed. However, Andrew is hoping to check his disks very soon and see if there is anything to be saved.

Check out the creator speaks section for now, but could potentially be a case closed very soon it seems!

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Cyber Squidgies

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Another SEUCK game for our archives, well… one that we have to find anyway!

This is yet another SEUCK from the Zzap Megatape article they ran a long while back in around 1992. Here they displayed readers games and said if they were good enough or not, and why.

One great little game was Cyber Squidgies by Michael Williams. A platformer with some cute looking sprites which wouldn’t look out of place in Creatures.

However, that was the exact problem with this game for Zzap 64, which was that it contained graphics too similiar to Creatures for their
liking. And so not to upset the Apex boys, Zzap never put it on their covertape. The single screenshot was all that was ever to be of the game.

Sadly, Michael Williams never released it into the PD scene, and so it still remains at large. We hope one day to find Michael Williams who may come across this review. It is possible he still has a disk/tape somewhere with his long lost game on. Otherwise we could really be seeing the end of this title, and closing the case.

Can you help?…

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Curse of the Mushroom People

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

An interesting entry which ties in quite nicely with Attack of the Killer Tomatoes by the same company. Attack of the Mushroom People was to be based on one of those old really cheesy sci-fi movies which came out in the beginning (With hub caps on strings used for UFO’s etc), and along with Attack of the Mutant Tomatoes, this was to be a bit of fun making against the old franchises.

The Tomato game was never released unfortunately along with this mushroom game too. It is possible that the Mushroom game would have gone along the same lines using vector graphics to make up the game – or that’s at least what we originally thought.

We made an assumption when first adding this entry many years ago, that the same developers of the tomato game were working on this one too. However, in October 2023 – contributor Adam (see comments) flagged up that there was a deleted scene from an online documentary by Moleman which spoke with Ádám Zoltán and Erdély Dániel, who were from Andromedia and were the actual creators of the game.

Ádám was the developer of the game, and Erdély the graphic artist. In the video, they actually show the game up and running, and it seems to be pretty much complete. In the video, he says that he has the source code and wants to some day fix and release it. This was back in 2019 – at the moment, nothing more has been heard.

Check out the video for yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bRPSuGEe8Q , where we have extracted a few screenshots to add to this page. Hopefully some day soon we can replace these screens with real ones taken from an actual emulator.

The key thing of note is that the game seems to be a sort of clone of Sabre Wulf, with some nice hi-res graphics throughout. There is a pretty cool loading screen too.

So what happened? Check out the news clipping from Home Computer Weekly to find out a little bit more. It mentions that Global got the exclusive rights to the game rights. It was due to be released in mid-october of 1985 but never quite made it.

Can the game finally be patched up and released? Watch this space?

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 2 Comments

Curly Squirrel

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Curly Squirrel is a promising looking GTW entry which puts you in the control of a two sprite red squirrel in a single screen adventure. The aim of the game is a little unclear, mainly because the preview is in such an early phase.

However, interestingly the game development was started way back in around 1991 by Roland Hermans and Joachim Wijnhoven. This is the running preview which you can check out. This seemed to have got leaked back in 2005, and it came to light that the project was still being worked on, but with new graphics by Johan Janssen (Who released a picture from the game that he did for Primary Star 2005).

Recently we have been given all of the remains we know exist of Curly Squirrel thanks to Marco Das for the submission. In the submission both Joachim and Johan spoke about the project.

Joachim had the following to say:

"We wanted to sell the game under our game label Visual Delight to CP Verlag (Germany) we had an idea for the bonus levels in the game just like Time Runner this with our squirrel and with different levels like the forest meanies. etc.

i still have an unused sid lying from this level, but maybe i can still use it somwhere."

Johan also had the following to say regarding the disk remains:

“Graphics on the d64 are all from JSL (Johan) and the graphics in the playable preview are from Joachim.

D64 consists of:
– loading pic
– title pic
– background pic named curly trees
– 5 intro pics should be animated
– a few sprites for the intro
– bitmap sprites for converting to sprites a bear and a tortoise
– a playable preview from the nineties with gfx from Joachim”

It seems that the project fell by the wayside for reasons still currently unknown back in 1991. The project was much later picked up by Johan, who was to redo all the graphics we believe. Music was stll to be completed by Joachim (and hopefully we should be seeing/hearing the SID tunes very soon).

More details soon, but its believed that the coder decided to leave the project and a new developer was seeked to continue the project and complete it. Unfortunately no programmer could be found, and the plans to have a two screen level based game was axed. And now all the remains have been submitted to GTW, including many new pieces of artwork by Johan which have not been seen before. You can find everything on the download disk, including an executable preview. The screenshots can be viewed in the shots section if you do not want to dig out a graphic viewer (We just ran them through Congo to see them).

I’m sure the full picture of this game will be cleared up soon, but for now check it out!…

Sadly never quite to be…

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