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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Block Game

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

An exclusive title to GTW and for the Christmas update of 2006. Thanks to Dave Spicer, our next title was originally known only as “Block game” due to not being given a proper name during its development, but we later learn that the game was actually “Push a block”

Push-A-Block was a Pengo-style puzzler which was being coded by Nick Taylor on the C64 and on the Spectrum by David Spicer. Push-A-Block was a working name for their game, and a proper name was never actually created.

The aim of the game is very simple – to push all the blocks Pengo style into the gates whilst avoiding the enemies.

This was to be a rush produced title to be touted around to various budget labels, and would have also been released on the ZX Spectrum. It was produced by Nick Taylor (Who also brought us Bugs Bunny for Hi-Tec), with some level design by Dave (Though at present we’re guessing Dave handled the Spectrum version).

Dave had this to say:

“C64 coding was 100% by Nick, with no involvement from myself. Although I designed a lot of levels, I don’t think we ever got around to moving them over from the Speccy version.

The game was written in 1990 and wasn’t picked up because we never pitched it to anybody. :-) Some ideas for AI pathfinding were later used in Sergeant Seymour. “What AI pathfinding?” you might ask. Well, yea, the block game “AI” is 100% random, but I had written notes guv, honest.”

The game never got to see the light of day or was completely finished due to work on Adidas Football. David stated to GTW that it was hard to try and write two games at the same time, and this is why it never got finished.. Although not the most fantastic game in the world, and even frustrating at times during play – I’m surprised it wasn’t passed onto one of the budget labels. However, it became testing ground for ideas used in Sergeant Seymour.

We hope to cover more ground on this game soon, with Nick giving some info about work on the title.

For now, check it out and enjoy…

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 1 Comment

Blax

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

A recently found full game which was uncovered on the scene, and was developed in the early 90’s for a game’s company, but for strange reasons, it never quite made it out before now. It got given to Go64 magazine in about 2003.

Blax is kind of a mix of Puzznic and various puzzle games, where you have to match up the symbol shapes, but paths for these objects are hindered by holes, which must be blocked over with rocks.

Graphically, although the game is all in hi-res, it is nicely polished and functions well for the game. The game itself is extremely addictive, and is a little bit different from the conventional puzzler which we have all become used to of late. Sonically the game is very strong provided for too, and a series of great ditties play throughout.

And the best thing of all?… It is the whole kaboodle. No preview, but a full game which you can all enjoy as originally indended by the creators

What now needs to be found out, is whom this title was planned for, some more credit details and just WHY this good puzzle game never made its way onto the C64 market…

A found game, but with mystery still surrounding it for now…

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Biosmech

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

This is an obscure conversion which was brought to my attention by someone who i’ve forgot (Please email me to give you credit!!).

This was in development by Peurvian developers, Twin Eagles Group. Known as a port of "Gundam F-91". A top SNES game from the early 90’s.

The developers on their site said the following…

"GUNDAM F-91" PORTING – All routines were coded and the Cinema Display engine worked fine. The project had to be scrapped due to serious hardware limitations.

Visually the game ran into problems, and a lot of chopping and changing to get it running smoothly, eventually it became too crippled and was scrapped due to limitations.

So there you have it, a sad loss by the sounds of it. All that seems to remain is a little screenshot which we obtained from the site, but its low quality and you can’t see much.

After checking the disk with some of the work, sadly it was not working properly.. so sadly the game could be completely lost now. Unless one of the others in the team may have something left.

A great idea, but possibly too big a project for the C64…

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Beavers

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

Beavers was another promising title which Grandslam were entrusted to publish on various systems. You had to control “Jethro the beaver” through 4 valleys, each with 4 levels.

From the previews in the magazines, the game looked a very nice multi-directional platformer. Very colourful graphics, you could almost feel a great little game emerging. The magazines described the animation as “superb”, with many nice little touches, such as Jethro getting bored, and then going to sleep if you leave him too long. Commodore Format even proclaimed that the game could finally be what Sonic fans were waiting for.

Unfortunately nothing happened, and the game never surfaced. The Amiga version did, and received respectable marks in the 70% range.

The crew behind the game was originally traced to Arc Developments, and there was a lot of confusion over the existence of a C64 conversion. Richard Underhill could not remember the C64 production, and gave the possibility that either the game shots were mock ups or Grandslam had someone else doing the C64 conversion (the later being unlikely). Reviewers at both top UK magazines reported on the quality of animation and gameplay, so the first seems unlikely. So what has happened?

Well, it can now be confirmed that the game shots were actually “FAKE”. That’s right, an ex-employee of Grandslam, Steve Sargent has confirmed that the screenshots were generated on the Amiga/PC to generate publicity for the game. The fakes were confirmed by Jon Harrison as well, who remembers making all the screenshots up on an Amiga. The screenshot with two Jethros seems to be a give away too :)

Richard Underhill later recalled however developing a small demo which would scroll the level graphics, that were quickly ported over to a C64. It just pretty much showed the level map, with no interaction and some bubbles floating over the top. What little was produced was maxing out the memory (probably due to how the graphics were being pulled in). It was developed as a way of keeping Grandslam happy when they visited – making it seem like progress was being made whilst they were busy trying to finish the Amiga/ST versions first. It is possible that the C64 version would have been developed later, but by the time Beavers was finished on the 16-bits and Nick Faldo + Liverpool was done, the relationship broke down with Grandslam and it was never properly started.

Shame on Commodore Format and Commodore Power for proclaiming this “Excellent” conversion you say?… Well, unfortunately publicity has shown its ugly face on many occasions, and this sadly is just another moment. Who knows what may have been, what with Arc Developments producing some quality productions for Grandslam in their final years, this could have been a golden final curtain.

Extinction for this C64 based beaver… Case closed!

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Beast

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

A nice old preview, which very much reminds me of the classic "Shadow Of The Beast".

Featuring some nice graphics, with parallax scrolling features, the game has the standard building blocks of a good game. The only problem seems to be the small playing area visible to the gamer.

Doug Roberts informs GTW that this game started out as an attempt to re-create a scrolling foreground over a static background, with no real intention of making a game. However, as things progressed a game started to evolve. It never got further than this though, though Doug mentions that there could be some graphics unused lying around somewhere which he hopes to find.

Plans even at one stage were to use it as a demo part selector, where an entered door would load a particular demo part up. However, it never materialized.

Richard (Deek) Rinn was the only person to have a copy of the demo, which is how it has managed to sneak out. Doug was surprised to find his game on the web, and mentions that "Beast" was not the game’s name. Infact, no name was ever given really… so its a working name.

Deek provides some spot sfx, which neatly accompany the preview. The game is not too playable, with control over the main character seemingly the only option. You can’t enter any doors or new locations. The outside world seems the only area present in this game.

Promising "Shadow Of The Beast" clone that never got far enough…

Case closed…

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Batty Builders

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

A game created by the author of Ultimate’s “Imhotep” in a very short career on the C64. The developer also worked on another title which was to be a conversion of a classic Atari game, Batty Builders which he earlier did in around 1983.

This was a kind of puzzle game which would have done ok on the C64 had it been updated slightly, but I’m not sure exactly what the developer had got when they developed this game.

An interview told that the game had in fact been fully completed, but just left unreleased. We are currently not sure why the game was never released, but we are guessing it is because a publisher could not be found.

It could be possible that the game still exists in a disk box somewhere , but sadly it isn’t in the developers hands any longer.

How good was this game?… Will we ever know?

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Battle Ball

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

Part of a series of Power House titles which never quite saw the light of day.

Battle Ball was deemed another shoot ’em up in which the Battle Ball of the title must destroy a world defence computer gone haywire. This was all the information given out on this interesting title.

The game was an enhanced SEUCK effort done cheekily by Stoo Cambridge, using a tool which was done by the development team that he’d later be a part of!

It was done mainly as a laugh at the time to make some quick money using a well proven game production tool. In the early days of SEUCK, it was becoming fairly common for people trying to submit SEUCK games to be released as commercial efforts. This particular SEUCK effort was hacked a lot by Stoo to ensure it didn’t look first off like a SEUCK game – though a look under the bonnet would surely prove it used the engine.

Stoo sold the game to Power House, got paid, but Power House went under just before they could release the game. Battle Ball never actually got reviewed, but only mentioned briefly with a series of other Power House titles which were on the way.

In March 2014, Stoo posted all of his disks to GTW64 and we were able to preserve the title in full!

You can now download the entire game, including variations where Stoo was playing with the title screen configurations. There is also a unused loading screen, but there may have been another loading screen on the disk, but it corrupts when trying to decompress. Not sure if anyone fancies a look at that? Also there was a disk called Cyba-Ball, which was an earlier version of Battle Ball – but sadly the disk would not read at all after many attempts to save it.

In 2020, Stoo dug out some development notes and a print out of a loading screen which seems to be lost. Also, a letter from The Power House with a first offer for the game.

Then inspired by the Alpha Omega/CRL loader, Richard Bayliss has created a tape version of Battle Ball with the proper loader. This is likely a very close replication of how the final mastered tape game could have been. Check it out!

This is yet another commercial title saved from obscurity, thanks to the efforts of Stoo Cambridge. Check out this cool early SEUCK title from one the Sensible boys!

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Barbarian 3

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

Barbarian 3 first started off as a basic sequel to Barbarian 2, following a similar structure. This was the period when both Steve Brown and Richard Leinfellner were involved in the development. Basically whilst the sequel was in development, Steve had already decided that the game would benefit being turned into a trilogy. So the once planned ending to number 2 was changed so that Drax escaped through a mirror at the end of the game to lead onto the 3rd title.

The main major change was that the 3rd game would now scroll instead of being flick screen based. When an action sequence occurred, then the game would switch to a larger and zoomed in fight view for the 16-bit editions. The C64 would keep the characters the same size throughout.

The game as a whole was to feature more dark humour, and some stunning animation throughout, following the footsteps of the previous titles. However, things seemed to be unstable at Palace, so Steve decided to move on from the Palace and the Barbarian 3 project.

Simon Birrell would take over the development in terms of the game design, and he wanted the game to have more platform action overall and made a new direction for the title. Simon confirmed that the title was also changed at this stage to “Super Barbarian”, as part of a duo of updates to two classic Palace games. The other game was “Super Cauldron”, which would see release much later.

Dave Chapman was assigned as developer – handling the game editors and engine for the ST and Amiga editions. It was uncertain though who was behind the C64 conversion, and Simon couldn’t recall – it is believed that it may have been Rob Stevens, who developed the sequel and we hope to confirm soon.

Thanks recently to Tobias Hultman, a Swedish magazine back in June 1992 mentioned Super Barbarian on the 16 bit systems at least. So we get a few more details about what the game was to consist of. The game was essentially to be split into two parts:

Part 1:

A tournament game placed in a Colosseum-like arena where the player fight against either 16 computer controlled enemies or up to 8 human players.

  • Several weapons to choose from: Sword, axe, mace
  • Replay function which makes it possible to see sequences from the fights.
  • You can see injuries on body parts.

Part 2:

A action adventure where the goal is to rescue the good wizard’s daughter held captive in Drax’s tower.

  • Solve puzzles, find secret rooms and relics.
  • 6 levels, a forest, hell … other levels to be decided.

The game was rumoured to be at a playable stage by 1992, but Palace would suddenly go bankrupt and Titus would buy them out. Where Blues Brothers was finished and released, Super Barbarian was not.

Although there isn’t anything yet to show of the game on the C64 (or even the ST, Amiga and PC versions), luckily Steve still had development sketches for the game, and thanks to Martyn Carroll for passing them on, we are able to show these design sketches for the first time (Sadly they were unpublished in Retro Gamer as intended).

Steve also once said the following in an interview with Eurogamer (thanks to Fabrizio Bartoloni for the heads up):

“It was a great shame as I had Barbarian 3 mostly planned out, including the publicity, which was going to feature my other favourite model of the time, Debee Ashby. I’d designed and had miniatures built of a giant tentacled monster, plus had a meeting with the monster makers at Pinewood Studios about constructing a full-sized animatronic tentacle that would lift Debee up in the photoshoot. It would have been awesome”

Also, Ross Sillifant uncovered some more screenshots and news of the 16-bit editions, which you can details of here. This gives a glimpse of possibly how the C64 version may have looked in terms of design.

Just who did the C64 conversion is still unknown, but some crucial information is uncovered on the title and there is confirmation that it was in development. Can we find anything of the code/graphics?

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 5 Comments

Bank Panic

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Bank Panic was a planned arcade conversion being done for Elite Software by Richard Gibbs, who previously wrote Knockout for Alligata software a year earlier.

Elite were keen to do arcade conversions, so Richard pitched this idea and started work on the game. He asked his old friend Steven Day if he could draw up a loading picture for him, and this he did. We only see this today due to Steve’s preservation of his past work.

As for the game itself, it only reached the stage of animated bitmaps, which looked the part for the game. All bitmaps were actually done by Richard himself, and was to be a first example of animated bitmaps in a C64 game.

One thing of note is that the game never actually got a mention in any of the magazines about being worked on, so it is possible that Elite decided against the idea. Maybe they couldn’t get the licence?

Ironically, Gremlin released a game very similiar around the same time called "West Bank"… Interesting developments occured recently when Zeldin/Cascade provided me with a bizzare version of West Bank, which has "Copyright Elite Software" written into the code. Other versions have it as Gremlin, so it seems some versions kept this copyright in by accident.

This therefore means that we are most likely looking at West Bank being the eventual Bank Panic game which was released. Elite rejected the conversion, so Richard Gibbs must have gone to Gremlin with the game and they accepted it (but as a clone, not as an official arcade conversion).

If you check Knockout by Richard Gibbs, you’ll notice a few similarities with regards to charsets, so we are pretty confident now that we have found our game, and it was already released! :-) You can check out the download which sadly is corrupted, but search the code in a machine code monitor and you’ll find the Elite credit. We’ll get a working version soon we hope!

The story is not 100% clear yet, and it will require tracking down Richard Gibbs to find out more. Information about possible location is given out by Steve Day in his Creator Speaks segment, so hopefully someone can help.

A sad arcade conversion loss here, but seemingly released anyway…

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 3 Comments

Bad Enemies

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Back in the ’90s the italian version of Zzap! started offering some visibility to wannabe videogame programmers who wanted to proudly show their work.

At that time, Luca Balducci was developing a clone of ‘Street Fighter II’: it consisted of an incomplete but fully playable version, along with an intro and end sequence.

Compared to other ‘home made’ games reviewed by Zzap!, Bad Enemies was the result of an ambitious effort by a smart teenager and probably, with a little more work and some luck, it would have easily become a valid beat’em up. Here is the review

Even if brilliant, this idea suffered a defect: basically nobody had the chance to test what the editor reviewed!

But today, thanks to the internet, it can be done…

Here you are, get downloading!…

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