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.
An interesting creation by Altered Abilities, bringings in a ship similiar to the mothership in Firebird’s "IO".
The preview which made it out is packed with a sneak peak of the title screen and hi-score tablentures, which are quite good, but do not currently link to the game.
The game itself looks good, and could be good, but the preview doesn’t allow to get the feel for the game. You are basically trapped as soon as you start, and cannot easily navigate past the rocks to progress. Dying is therefore easy, and bugs prevent you from continuing, as the game crashes afterwards.
You can see the end sequence right away thanks to the preview that has been cracked, and unfortunatly doesn’t really offer much satisfaction if you were to plough through a full game.
The game features some great music by Reyn Ouwehand, and not much else is known about the game, apart from that it may have been planned for a future Magic Disk in Germany.
GTW is going to try establishing contact with the game’s producers to find out more about the game and if there exists a more advanced version than we have right here.
Good looking, but not currently too much under the bodywork…
What do we have here you ask?… Well, a little while before Ocean Software grabbed the rights to Arkanoid, Firebird were looking to publish the game.
Developer for Lynnsoft, Jake Simpson had spent some time producing a conversion of Arkanoid, and got a working demo together which was pretty good. Originally Jake had only produced the game as a trainer for himself so he could play Arkanoid down the pub better. He showed it to Lynnsoft and they approached Firebird to publish it.
At the time however, there was a legal battle going on between Atari and Taito. Atari was suing Taito over Arkanoid, saying that it was a rip off of their Breakout game. Atari looked like they were going to win, and Firebird had approached Atari as a result. Atari agreed to Firebird’s approach, as long as they won the lawsuit. Sadly they lost, and so Firebird and Lynnsoft lost the rights to convert the game fully.
The game as a result became lost to time, and it wasn’t until 2009 when GTW preserved all of Matt Young’s C64 disks from his Lynnsoft days that the remains were discovered. What remains is a playable conversion, not quite complete… but plenty to look at. The game lacks polish compared to the final version by Ocean which would have no doubt had been polished had Atari won the battle. The game differs a fair amount to the Ocean conversion, most notably in the way that Lynnsoft’s conversion was full screen compared to 2/3rds which Ocean’s version took up.
Jake mentioned that there was a BASIC program that was written to build all the levels, but sadly this hasn’t been located at present. But at the very least we can present you with a glimpse of something rather special and surprising!…. It certainly was a surprise to Richard Hewison :-)
The game is quite hard to play. Press F1 on the title page to switch the joystick/keyboard control. Holding fire makes the bat go faster, pushing up launches the ball. If you get laser, its space to fire.
Not much was known about this game originally, apart from that it was by Realtime Software. This was for the Commodore 64 version only, and other 8-bit versions were to follow at a later date.
There was never a review of the game or anything else shown apart from adverts it seems. So did the company collapse before the game could be released, or was it just cancelled for other reasons?
Thanks to Pete Weighill, we learn what the game was going to be like…
The game was not a shoot-em-up like their 3D Starstrike releases, but was a new arcade adventure that starred the legendary hero Jason (as in Jason and the Argonauts) in search of the Golden Fleece.
The game would have contained around 30 screens of highly detailed graphics along with some equally detailed game play. The game was due for release just after the Christmas period for £7.95, but never quite made it.
We got in touch with Andy Onions who confirmed that the game was a graphically rich adventure scroller, for the Commodore 64 only. The game was being developed by both Graeme Baird (one of Andy’s colleagues at Realtime Games Software) and another guy called John Knox – who had no affiliation to Realtime, but was on a computing degree around the same time as Graeme, Ian Oliver and Andy. We believe that it is the same John Knox who has a few other titles unreleased to his name.
Although there were adverts for the game, Andy suggests that nothing really came of it. The adverts were placed 2-3 months ahead of time, with Graeme and John theoretically working on the game over the summer period. They got their attentions diverted unfortunately, and it would never see completion.
It is hoped that we can get hold of Graeme and John to find out more and see how far it got, even see if something may still exist of this intriguing game.
From the creator of Quota, and friend of ex-Commodore Zone editor Jason Kelk, came "Argo", which was described as a cross between Quedex and Delta.
The game was divided into two different sections, one in similiar vein to Quedex, and the other as a sideways SEU like Delta.
Information on publishing details is so far unknown, and hopefully Jason can enlighten GTW some more on this subject. Its likely that the game was planned for commercial release, as with Chris Young’s other projects.
According to Jason Kelk, the game has been completed, as there were mention of a final version. However, this has unfortunatly not been found, but a version close to final.
Jason was to originally fix the game for readers of Commodore Zone magazine, though since the magazine’s demise, the game is now in limbo once more. Progress will try to be made to find out where the game can go from here on, and if GTW will someday be able to use the game within its archives.
Another 3D vector game in the style of Stella 7 and Mercenary, Arena was a rather ambitious project by the quiet company Lothlorien.
Stated for release across most formats back in 1986, the game never made it at least onto the C64. We are not sure why, as Lothlorien continued to produce various games on the C64. Could it be that the developers could not get the 3D running to speed?
As you can probably tell from this rather poor review, we don’t actually know a great deal more about this game at present, and mainly we add it to the archives to preserve its memory until we do find out more. We have no names or any idea of what, how and why with this game.
Another GTW title which has been sat in waiting in the GTW file for almost an eternity. Arc Doors 2 is a sequel which was apparently in production by New Entry, after the success of the first game, which was an addictive extension of the classic Frogger genre.
We got in touch with the original’s author Michal BacÁk, who had the following to say…
“I remember Strip poker (nice to see screenshots from the game again). However I can’t remember a thing about Arc Doors 2. I believe we even didn’t start on such project. We were working on a pinball game, but it was also early beginning. You know, after that years it’s hard to remember. ”
It is possible that the development team decided to move on from the C64, and found it not to be profitable anymore. Possibly after their Walkerz game they did.
It seems that the sequel to Arc Doors may have only been on paper, and could well be a case of case closed.
Text adventure from Kayde who went into administration at the 26th August 1983. Did Spectrum releases, tried to do C64 and Vic 20 ones, which never seemed to surface.
The game in the advert (Two adverts were submitted by Peter Weighill) was described as follows:
“In his job, Colin Grasmere has investigated many strange and baffling phenomena. Hauntings visions, flying saucers, poltergeists, to name a few. Colin Grasmere is a psychic investigator. Dare you face the beastly one with nothing but a cross and a heart full of purity?”
Originally we did not know exactly how far the game got or if it actually ever got released before the company collapsed, but GTW contributor Kevin Steele recently found the game on Ebay. You can see the inlay and tape of the game in the scans below.
So the game did get a release, and also Kevin found Leopard Lord. The very odd thing is that the game does not come with a proper inlay, and is on a recycled Leopard Lord tape. A game that only just sneaked out when the company was in big trouble?
In March 2017, Kevin managed to get the game backed up and recovered from a damaged tape. Then in December 2017, Hedning/Genesis Project kindly fixed the game into an original file from its freeze state.
Just how many copies are there out there in the world of this? Case closed!
Not too much to say here about this game at present. We know very little about it, but that god damn title tune is something I’ve heard somewhere before… that jingle…. but where?… a demo?… what?…. aghhh…
Thanks to Warren Pilkington, the tune came from a Future Composer demo tune by Sami Seppa (Rock / Finnish Gold) and was used in a number of demos at the time. An anonymous contributor also suggests that the jingle resembles parts of the menu theme from Rock ‘n Roll on the C64 and Amiga (also by Rainbow Arts).
Anyway, the game is a 3D based perspective Pinball game, with some interesting features including digital music and some nice graphics.
Unfortunately I can’t comment much on physics or gameplay, as the game is virtually unplayable. You can move the flippers, and the ball moves up and down, but doesn’t connect yet. Seems to be quite an early version of the game.
We are currently not sure what exactly happened to this game, but it had management behind it, so it could have been a pitch gone wrong… not sure why. It seems quite similar to the 3D Pinball game created by Stephen Walters, but we don’t believe the games are related in any way.
A lot more information needed on this game, so we can’t really say any more than that yet… Can you help with this game?…
Thanks to Richard Hewison for highlighting this particular GTW, and a rather interesting one at that!
Arcade Classics was a real fantastic budget title which did extremely well with its compilation of 4 classic games in one load, and with Rob Hubbards excellent music. For £1.99 it was a sure fire success and it would have been really silly to not produce a sequel.
Well, a sequel was indeed planned by Firebird, but according to Richard, he never saw any evidence to suggest that any coding was ever started. It is possible that the game was just part of an internal wish-list before Firebird was sold to Microprose at a later date.
The compilation was planned to feature Frogger, Galaxians, Defender and Missile Command… which would have been an awesome lineup for the sequel. It’s unsure if any of these were started, but its possible that Dave could have coded some of these individually first (Like he did with Space Invaders).
We heard from Dave himself in 2015, who was last seen when interviewed by Commodore Zone magazine in around 1998-99. He managed to dig out his other long lost game, Advanced Terrain Gardener a long time back… but it seems that Arcade Classics 2 never got started. The above titles were confirmed, but it seems only written down on a scrap of paper and never actually started.
It looks indeed that no Arcades Classics sequel will ever be found!
A fairly obscure title this time from U.S. Gold. Arcade Wizzard is a pinball game which was briefly mentioned in one or two magazines before disappearing off the face of the earth.
Zzap! 64 was on magazine to feature the game, and included some screenshots in their 1988 Christmas preview section. One thing they described about the game was that it was quite garish. This is what else they had to say…
“Also from US Gold comes a pinball simulation entitled Arcade Wizzard. The action takes place across a series of tables (pinball tables that is), each of which can only be played when a certain qualifying score has been reached.
Play starts on table 1, and if 10,000 is reached, then you can play table two, then table three and so on. In the version that we’ve seen, there are a few strange quirks, such as an old piece of music and an… er… ‘unusual’ control method. (Well, Maff thinks it’s unusual).
Some of the graphics on the preview version are rather hard on the eyes, but we’ll have to wait for the finished product until we know for sure what the game is going to be like – so keep your eyes peeled (Don’t you think that sounds rather disgusting? Well I do. In fact I’ve always thought it was bit odd, right from… (Shut up, Maff!) Oh, alright).”
So from the sounds of things, the game was not shaping up nicely at all. So did U.S. Gold feel this as well?… Looking at the table, it seems even more simplistic than pinball games on the C64 from 1984.
We don’t know just yet why this game was cancelled, though we hope to very soon. First of all we need to gain credits for the game and then we can start tracking it down some more. Recently we found some far better quality screenshots in Zzap Italia, and have added these to replace the poor quality UK printed shots.
More research needed for this one.. but it doesn’t look like we are missing too much at the moment.
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