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.
A very early preview of a game consisting of a controllable fish which can swim around the one screen present here. Swimming off the screen makes you reappear on the opposite end.
Apart from a little animated interaction with another sea creature, there is little else to this preview apart from its good graphics and animation of the main character.
No other details were located with this game, apart from the fact that a company called Yellow Byte were the producers. The game otherwise appears to be based on collecting certain objects as specified by the sea creature in flick screen style.
However, Nicolas Stark got in touch with GTW64 recently after resurrecting a project for RGCD’s latest competition and had the following to say:
"Bilbo – very early version of Al the Fish, as this version suggests it was originally meant to be a screen-flipping game, but I dropped it in favor to a scroll-based game instead"
So there we have it!…. there is nothing more to find, and this was actually what eventually turned into Al the Fish. So follow to that page to see the progress :-)
Big Run was the Jaleco coin-op based on the Paris to Dakkar rally which includes a very tough rally car which can be crashed into anything and still plod on.
Popular in the arcades, this C64 conversion was part of Storm’s sudden interest in the C64 and from the games that finally made it, this game could have been good. The game became news in issues of Zzap and Commodore Format, talking of Storm’s new releases. Storm took a very long time to release their games and many including this game, just never appeared.
Thanks to Neil Grayson of the Commodore Format archive, we learnt that the end of the Rodland demo on Commodore Format’s Power Pack 12 has an advert for the game (see gallery). The game was listed as being due for release in January 1992.
Rob Whitaker however confirmed to GTW that this game was never started. It seems that only 16-bit editions would be released in the end – perhaps being felt that the C64 couldn’t do a decent conversion.
So this means that the case for this game can finally be closed, with a title where there is nothing to look for. Had the game been done, the graphics would have been by Rob.
Big Business is a strategy game where you have to run a business and do various dodgy things. It’s a combination of business and humour according to most reviews for the Amiga platform. – on which it actually got a release. The C64 version is sadly lost at sea for reasons currently unknown.
With the game itself – you have to get things like raw materials coming in to supply a production line, building factories, pumping money into research and development. You can do things such as spy on other companies, sabotage and even take them over too. According to the reviews, the actual humour is lacking, and just seems to be limited to the cartoony graphics throughout.
The game was fairly well recieved across magazines, but didn’t do too well overall. Maybe a C64 version wouldn’t be missed after all, but still it would be nice to find out what happened to it and maybe even find a full game?
In around 1991, most developers would be focusing on the Amiga first and then C64. Maybe after the flop of the Amiga version, they decided to drop the C64… or just dropped C64 support anyway like most developers were at that time. How many C64 games did you see by Magic Bytes in 1991/92??
Anyway, we need developer names… we assume it was a fully German production so hopefully some German viewers can help us with this one?…
A game being produced by R Pedersen, who developed a number of games which never made the light of day. The games were all made in MSDOS first, then ported easily over to the C64 and Apple machines.
This game came to light thanks to an interview with Roger at http://www.gamedev.net/columns/interviews/rpederson.asp . The game is based on the board game of the same name where it had a dictionary of 1-7 letter words and played like the MB game.
Roger tells GTW that the game was created initially on the IBM PC, and was due to have a C64 conversion created. The IBM version was not paid for however, and therefore the C64 version was never fully developed or released. It might have had a test conversion started, but we’re not too sure.
It is hopeful that we may find some remains of this game, though it is not very likely… we’re more likely to find a full version of Myth 2… :)
A short entry by active C64 developer, Richard Bayliss.
Big Bite Live was basically meant to have been a boxing game, based on The Big Fight Live programmed in BASIC with machine code routines like a IRQ music player.
The game never saw the light of day and sadly it seems that the game will never be found and released. Mainly because the game was never actually started!
It was talked about and discussed quite heavily, but in the end it was scrapped before anything was started.
All that was started were a few plans and some text done within "Movie Scoller" (Which is long lost now).
Just how good it would have been, we will never know. But it’s and easy open and closed case for this one!
Information is a bit scarce, as all we currently know is that the game was to feature Biff again, and to be a Mario clone of some kind.
In one of the Spectrum magazines of the time, there was mention of Biff 2 in a bit more detail. It was however described as more of the same, but with the ability to ride bicycles, swim and explore a far larger game with more complex puzzles.
Could this be the very same game as described in the interview with Jim Scott?
Contact has been made with Jim Scott, but sadly we have not heard anything back just yet. Hopefully soon we will hear back and find some information based on this game and the others.
So for now we have no credits for the game, so hopefully someone will step forward for it.
A World War II based game this time in the form of the interestingly named “Betsy WWII Flying Ace”. This was the product of programmer Marc Walters, who describes the game as follows:
“This game was only about 20% complete, featuring a flying cow (propeller attached to her, flying over the Channel Islands shooting German planes and ground installations.
A key strategic point was that she fuelled up by eating grass.I think there is a scrolling demo and not much else of this.
The project was abandoned due to time constraints.”
Information is a bit scarce, and this is all we know at present.
Marc informed GTW that he still has code for most of his projects, so hopefully we’ll be seeing some of these in action.
For Betsy, we may not get to see too much… but it will be intriguing to see something of the game sometime soon.
Benidorm is a little known game which was due for release on both the Spectrum and C64 back in 1984 from a software company called Little Softie. The game was advertised in the likes of Personal Computer Gamer, and we think that the game was only available through mail order (confirmed thanks to a magazine news snippet highlighted by Arcachnar).
Sadly nothing of the game has ever surfaced, and we believed as a result that the game never got a release. Only World Of Spectrum had one remains of a Little Softie title, which was Microweight – a non-game which allowed people to calculate their weight. No C64 version seems to exist of this.
Just what this game was about, we are not sure. It is likely that this game was a graphic adventure set at the holiday resort (In the same vein as the Melbourne House game set on an island). We need to do a lot more research, and most likely with regards to the company. Did the company go bust before the game was released, or maybe it just didn’t sell?
Well, contributor Sean spotted a small snippet in Commodore User magazine which suggests that the author of Benidorm was trying to sue the creators of Terrormolinos by Melbourne House, which he believed ripped off his game (this has now been added to the scans). The author was listed as Ray Kearney and the article also states about the game being released a few years earlier to Terrormolinos, suggesting it was actually completed and sold. Even the writer mentioned that the game was far more sophisticated in comparison to Terrormolinos.
We learn that the game came in 3 flavours, one where you control Lord Lucan, the game was a very similar text adventure concept to Terrormolios of course, it was written in The Quill and had no graphics.
So where is this game now, and can it be saved? Check out the magazine snippet for now for the full details!
Behemoth was to be a kind of Armalyte clone for a budget label to pay some bills at Walking Circles. When questioned, the game’s developer Carleton Handley had the following to say:
“Our C64 work from Domark dried up as they moved on to the Amiga etc. At that time Walking Circles was a company of 6 people. 3 programmers, 2 artists and an accountant so we didn’t have the staff or cash to do anything massive. Armalyte was one of my favourite games at the time and there were a few budget knock offs out there.
We decided to do one of those as it’d only be about 6 weeks work. We had a couple of levels going but something else came along (I can’t remember what, probably some stuff with Psygnosis which led to the end of Walking Circles) and worked stopped, never to be started again.
I’m still surprised nobody has used the name Behemoth for a game, I think it’s a great title! Maybe I’ll do one soon.”
Sadly the demise of the C64 as a viable platform was the main reason why the game never got finished off for the likes of Codemasters, Zeppelin or Alternative software.
Carleton mentioned to GTW that the remains of the game were around somewhere still, and that we would be able to put them on the website if found. Well, in 2015 – that time came!
We helped Carleton preserve all of the source code to the game, which has 3 unfinished levels in total, which you can check out here for the first time. Carleton has very kindly said that we can include the original source code too, so here it is in the download!
Overall it was shaping up very nicely, and could have been a good solid budget game if completed. A huge shame that it never quite made it.
A great finding and a huge shame that it never quite made it.
Bee 52 was to be one of Codemasters’ last ventures in the C64 market before moving fully onto the 16-bits. A cute little game where you control a bee who must fill up on honey, whilst avoiding various creatures. It did well enough on the likes of the NES, but the C64 version never quite made it.
Well, some will argue it did get a release, but it never got an official Codemasters release. Although reviewed in Commodore Format (and I think Commodore Force without my scans to hand to confirm), Codemasters decided that sales were too poor now for the C64 and decided to not release the game (even though it was complete). So no fanfare or final farewell it seems.
However the game’s author Nick Taylor, presumably miffed that his other game Grell and Falla had a similar fate a little before, came to an agreement with Codemasters to release the game via mail order. No fancy inlays, just a basic disk with instructions that were apparently photocopied from a standard set that Codemasters produced. However it was through this that the game inevitably got cracked and spread.
Sadly Nick didn’t get many sales, but its thanks to the release that it managed to sneak out. Although this is not a GTW to be hunting for, it is one which never got commercially released and one we should give an entry for to preserve its story.
If you haven’t checked it out already, grab a copy of this excellent full game and enjoy!.
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