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

Boxing Manager 2

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

Boxing Manager was a fairly standard management affair which was released on the C64 back around 1987/88 and which seemed to be popular enough for the management mad company D&H to release a sequel. However, although mention in various adverts, the sequel never surfaced on the C64 even though it did on the Spectrum.

Recently Gary Pearson got in touch with GTW and shared the following:

“Some time back in the 80s (probably about 1988 at a guess) I submitted a tech demo to D&H to prove my coding competence which they accepted and sent me a contract to convert Boxing Manger 2 along with the Spectrum version. I loaded up the Spectrum version and realized the game was total rubbish. Even though it was written in basic and probably could have been converted in a week or so if i stuck with basic I just didn’t like the game and never even started it.

Sorry its not a found game but I guess its one that can be crossed off the list unless they found another programmer to do it.”

So we can confirm that there was indeed plans for the conversion – but did anyone else pick it up? … Now unless i’m getting very confused somewhere, the main boxing scene looks *very* familiar to a screenshot that i’ve seen in one of the big C64 magazines. Was it Zzap 64?…. Therefore the game may well have been reviewed or covered in some way on the C64. Well, after some research my mind wasn’t playing tricks, but the game was actually reviewed by Commodore Format in issue 26. The scan can be found here.

We can tell that it is the C64 version due to the colours in the screenshots and tones, so did this ever get released, or did D&H go under just before it got out of the door?….

Well, thanks to Sean O’Neill, the game has been spotted on the Retro Collector website and we can now confirm it was released on the C64 and is just to be preserved in time. It seems that the D&H game was released a few years earlier, and Cult got someone to do a C64 conversion for their budget label, but as it was a late release – there were likely limited sales.

John Christian Lønningdal very kindly has preserved the copy that he found and has allowed us to add it onto the site. So finally the game is now fully preserved for posterity!

Case closed!

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Boxing Champion

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

A good looking boxing sim from the Italian gaming giants “Simulmondo”.

Apart from the standard sideways boxing we are all accustomed to with most C64 boxing games, you could face front ways to attack your opponent using a variety of moves.

Confirmed by Gaz Spence in 2015 as released in 1992!

http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=1068&d=18&h=0

Case closed!

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 2 Comments

Bounce

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Our next title comes from an advert which actually advertises about 2 other titles which never saw the light of day, Sabian Island and Solar Warrior.

Bounce is mainly described in the advert as an arcade adventure on the planet D49 as you try to collect the crystals of ZEB from inside a pyramid. If you make one mistake and your transporter flies out of control.

Basically we assume that you control a moon buggy type character, which bounces around the screen (possibly a side on view). This is based on looking at the game cover, but you can’t really judge a game by its cover, as the old saying goes.

Apart from that, we know little about this game, so it could be a long slog trying to find anything out on it. Skyslip Software don’t seem to be a company that was around for very long, so current assumptions are that the games were being produced, but the company collapsed before any of them were released. So many games unreleased, something like that is probably what happened.

Much more research needed for this one, but check out the scan for the time being.

Do you know anything about this game?…

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Boulderdash Clone

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

A working title, but a Bolderdash Clone was indeed in production with graphics being carefully pixelled by Shaun Pearson. Code was being done by Simon (Uzzy) Collis of Entropy.

What can be said about the game, apart from that interest was apparently lost while developing the game, and it was prompty cancelled. Shaun had done some sprites and graphics, including a main character which was constructed in Blackmail’s HISP editor and used 7 overlaid sprites.

According to Shaun, there was a level editor built for building all the levels, which he apparently used. It may be down to Simon to finding anything of the game though, as Shaun may only now have the graphics for the game.

We are not quite sure how far the game got, but we believe that the graphics probably got further than the actual code did.

Bolderdash fans might have had something special here, but will we ever know?… Hopefully someday soon we will bring you something of this intriguing title, including maybe a name :-)

Let the search begin!…

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Boombastic Benny

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

This is probably the most similar looking Dynablaster game which you will find on the C64 in terms of its graphics. Very much faithful to the original classic.

This preview is however a little slower paced than the original, but just as fun. Bomb all the other creatures or bomb your friends, this game has always been addictive.

What with some already good playable bomberman clones out there, this one would have had some very big competition, but so far from looking at the preview, it could have held its own.

Unfortunatly, the game never progressed past its preview stage which is a great shame. This was confirmed by one of the game’s developers themselves.

What has been shown to GTW, is a slightly more advanced preview which actually contains music and sound effects. This has been added to the archive above for you to check out. It adds something slightly extra to what is already a great little preview.

However, recently for the Freestyle Jam which is being ran in 2007 – This game has been modified and finished off for the competition… though minus its multiplayer mode. It has been called Bomberman 64. We believe that the guys also plan to finish Boombastic Benny and release to the world, complete with possibly 4-5 players!! :-)

We are hoping soon to have some paragraphs spoken from the authors themselves very soon, so we can find out more about this interesting little Polish title…

Classy looking bomberman clone…

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Bombzone

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

Minesweeper games are not exactly few and far between, and Bombzone is more evidence of this on the C64.

A small Minesweeper clone which is what it is, and seems to have been prepared by the developer to be given to Sunrise as a first release (Though the scroller is not complete).

However, the game does not seem to be complete either and not playable at this stage. So if you were hoping for a good game of Minesweeper, then you might be disappointed :)

Coder Andrea has confirmed that the game was just done for fun and was never finished. This was it! So it is very much a…

…case closed!

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 2 Comments

Bombmania

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Not to be confused with the game of the same name that Protovision released (We think?)

This may have got dropped/renamed fairly early on due the name clash. Or are we completely wrong, and was this infact when a different label was to release the game?

More soon we hope for this one!…

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Bomberman Clone

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Another game from Mike Berry, this time a title briefly being developed we assume towards the end of the C64’s commercial life. Dynablaster/Bomberman around 1992 was pretty huge in popularity, and a C64 conversion was due, but never surfaced.

There were a number of clones however, and Mike was to try and add to this.

Sadly it was never to be, and we assume it has been lost to time – considering that nothing has been released of it.

We hope that in the future someone may come forward with remains of it, but for now we’ll try and find out some more background from Mike himself.

Do you know any more about this game?

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Bomber Clot

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

Bomber-clot was only ever briefly mentioned in the pages of various fanzines of the time. This was to be a game based on Bomberman, but that is about all we can say about the game at present until we get more information from Ewen himself.

Was this game to be an update of an existing game already out there? (Like Super Nova and Penguin Towers V2 was?) or was this a game created from scratch. We believe that this was actually going to be built upon the initial Penguin Tower rework that Ewen had did, when he had cloned the original game to continue. Possibly Bomber Clot resulted as a way of modifying the game so it was no longer recognisable as Penguin Towers. We don’t believe that anything really progressed past the idea though.

It is likely that had the game been fully finished, this would have gone out on the Commodore Scene software scheme that they were running at the time. Approximately £2 got you a disk full of new software, which was a great idea at the time thanks to Richard Bowen.

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Bomb

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

A sequel you could never have imagined existed, let alone started, with the unexpected sequel to RISK. An excellent and underrated C64 game by Chris and Tony West. Shocked?… Well, we were when Chris West got in touch and stunned us with the preview to test out.

Chris you may know also did the flawless conversion of Super Space Invaders for Domark back in 1991. Bomb was started just before this time, and way after R.I.S.K from 1988.

Chris and Tony started this game long after Edge had closed its doors and originally started this game for fun, and in the hope they could quickly sell it to a company. Unfortunately the game just never got completed, and Chris and Tony went onto other projects. Since then it has gathered dust on Chris’ work disks.

What was completed?

Only one level was ever completed, and already the game looks awesome. It can only be described as a kind of sooped up version of Scramble, with its missiles that fly upwards towards your excellently animated ship (Animating to the standard of RISK and similar to Tran and Defensive) that fires Defender style lasers and drops its Scramble-like bombs.

Impressive still is the stunning landscapes in the first level, and the explosions of the enemies and your main ship. If you’ve seen Chris and Tony’s previous work, you will come acquainted to this high standard of work.

The preview has music and SFX from R.I.S.K, and a simple title screen and hi-score to tie it all together. It’s sad that it never quite got finished, but the first level alone is worth checking out. Additionally we have just put in the rare version which has proper lasers that isn’t in the released demo.

Chris tells GTW:

“It was meant to feel like Scramble as we liked that game, but we wanted to bring a little more variety to it. So, big bosses like in Super Space Invaders, rescuing little Boffins again like Risk, and a lot more weapons, of which only coded 3 so far.”

There were originally plans to finish the game around the early 2000’s, but Chris and Tony disappeared completely and numerous contact attempts failed. It seemed very unlikely that the game would ever get completed. However, things were about to change in 2023!

After GTW posted up a retrospective video of the game in action in July 2023, it gathered some interest – especially from Thalamus, who tagged Chris to see if he was interested in passing the game over to them to finish off. Chris and Tony have agreed, and it could be that Bomb will finally see release on the Thalamus label after over 34 years. It was also revealed that the game was pitched to Domark for release, but they were not interested.

Chris and Tony have also been digging out some design docs, which we have added to the page and will continue to do so over time. We’ll keep you updated, but this is no longer a case closed!

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 5 Comments