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

Alien Vs Predator

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

A short entry for our next GTW. This is one of the first mentions of the Alien VS Predator franchise which Activision first started out with.

Commodore Format first talked about plans of Activision to produce a game for the home systems based on the popular comic (and long before the movie or console games came about).Commodore Format were quoted as saying that this was Activision’s “Most promising game”. Nothing else was known at the time about the game.

Sadly Activision lost interest with the 8-bits, and the game never surfaced, and nor did really any other new single releases after the likes of Atomic Robokid and Dragon Breed.

The game franchise did however surface about 4/5 years later on various platforms including the Jaguar. The 16-bit console versions were platform affairs, which no doubt the C64 would have been trying to emulate.

We do not know exactly how far the C64 conversion got, or if indeed the game was ever actually started or not. Commodore Format may have got their information wrong, so we could be searching for nothing. We urgently need new information on this title, so if you can help us, then please do so :)

Ross Sillifant did find what seems to be a PC/Amiga shot from 1993, so the game had been in development for sometime (see scans) – we just don’t know if a C64 version ever existed.

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 14 Comments

Alice In Wunderlab

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

This rather bizzarely named game was first reviewed in Home Computer Weekly on the 29th November 1983 and was priced at £7.50.

The game was a text adventure game, and seemed to be sold from home. The address given in the review to send off for the game was:

Arthur Loosely, 18 Longlands Road, Sidcup, Kent

The best way to describe the game would be to hand over to the review which HCW printed:

"This is a text-based adventure game set in an experimental reactor laboratory. It rather cleverly combines the usual maze type adventure with some extra features.

You are issued with a personal code and a reactor start-up code. Once you have started, the reactor problems develop, and its a race against the meltdown time to prevent the inevitable big bang.

To do this you have to find your way through the maze of rooms, overcoming problems on the way to locate a Time Machine. This machine allows you to go back in time, if you now how, to a point where you can prevent the catastrophe.

There are three levels of difficulty for the game and I reckon even the first will take many hours to solve. S till, depending on how well you do you may get a medal.

Once you start moving through time, however, its a different story. Some of the building work may be different. There can’t be many games where you need separate maps for different years.

The scale of the game means that it takes a long time to load. Four to five minutes, but if you like adventures its worth it. I enjoyed this game as a interesting variation on the Dungeon and Dragons theme

Insturctions 70%
Playability: 70%
Graphics: 50%
Value for money: 70%
"

Unfortunately nothing of the game seems to have been preserved, so was it ever sold to anyone or released at all?….

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Alfred J Kwak

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

Another title from the Twilight guys, Harold Klink and Martijn Althuizen.

Alfred J Kwak is a promising title, which although in a very early development stage, looks like a rather good Mario/Fred’s Back clone with a duck as the main character. The game would have most likely been published by a UK publisher, or by Magic Disk or similiar had it been completed.. though a licence would have had to have been granted, as the game is based on a popular cartoon character.

This game was enthusiastically in development, though sadly interest was lost with the development of the game quite early on, and it was cancelled for concentration to be made on other productions.

From the work disks of Harold and Martijn, GTW has uncovered a series of pictures and a working demo of the game, which you can move the main character, but cannot interact with the scenary of the game. It is therefore a mere glimpse of what could have been had more been done, or had the game been completed. A big thanks to Skeletor for piecing together the jigsaw which was the remains of this game!

Harold has kindly given GTW permission to enclose the source code for the game, which you can download from the link above. Enjoy!

More soon from the developers!…

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Al The Fish

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

A strange, but cute looking game with a well drawn fish as the main character. Similar to the underwater levels of Donkey Kong Country on the SNES, if you want to compare to other games.

There is little in the game, apart from Al The Fish who roams around a small colourful map, with loads of collectable goodies.

The preview is very bugged, and garbage mars the preview at the top of the map, and there is no sound, but there is something about the game which offers plenty of promise.

The game feels good, and looks good, and could have been good… or was it good?… How far did the game ever reach. No-one knew exactly who did what on the game… until now…

Nicolas Stark stepped forward and shed the following light on the game:

"Al the Fish – was meant to be an action RPG where Al was called to rescue his family members who where captured by some evil sea-creature.The game was supposed to contain huge maps and end bosses.

To access certain areas of the map, special items where required which had to be found or conquered by killing special enemies (or so it was projected).

The preview shows still an very early stage of the game, IIRC at least 5 or 6 maps and quite a bit of the enemy sprites had been finished. The project was eventually dropped for the lack of time."

A huge shame then and confirmation that the game was never completed. We hope that Nicolas may have more of the game he can share in time. For now, check out the awesome preview and also have a look at the game that Al the Fish originally was going to be like (Bilbo).

More developments soon we hope!…

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Alert

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

Another game with not much information. A promising game however, featuring elements of an old favourite from the past, Combat from the Atari 2600.

This two player game features two tanks for which you can choose the weapons to arm them with. Then you both go to battle on a single screen terrain.

Graphics are very simple, and the backdrop looks a little prototype. Game plays fairly well, but is clearly lacking the elements which were probably being planned for the game.

A good concept and idea, needing much more work. But just how much more work was made on this game, and who was making it?

A Combat game for our C64, or maybe not quite…

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 1 Comment

Alea Jacta

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

A rather cool GTW entry this time, and luckily one which you are easily able to download and play for yourself. So no search required here, but an entry none-the-less for this interesting little shooter which we think was developed sometime in 1991.

The game is a sideways scrolling space shooter with 6 levels in total, written by Julian Crooke whilst at school over the course of a year. The game was never released to anyone, I guess because the C64 was currently dying out or the game just gathered dust as Julian moved on.

The game surfaced after in around 2002 it was given to Triad by a friend of Julian’s… so the game is thankfully out there.

This was all that ever existed of the game, and includes music, title screens and an end sequence. It isn’t the best shooter in the world, but it’s certainly one of the better ones out there, and it has some excellent touches such as the water surface.

Check it out… and another case which we can open and close right away…

Case closed…

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Albyon

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

Albyon was a game promising to be what Ultima was and a whole lot more. In an issue of ASM 12/88 (As highlighted to GTW by Zeldin), there was an article about the game’s creators (The authors of “Die Fugger“), viewing a demo of their new game.

Features were described, and supplied with a screenshot to get people dreaming…

The game, again in Ultima style, was to use 8 disk sides, 800 graphic icons (Ultima had 512), 10,000 sprites, proportional fonts, animated windows, 3D battle scenes, interactive characters and an own developed RPG-Interpreter…. Phew!, a lot, and the demo’s proved this ambition was real at a party of “Der Computer-Club e.V.”, whom the owner at that time was Knuth Reuter.

More information is needed on the exact distance the game made before it was scrapped. The game could even have been finished, though on the scale of the project, this may have been unlikely. Hopefully a trace of the game’s creators will lead onto more on this game, and maybe some previews which were shown at the party mentioned above.

A game possibly in the same league as Newcomer…

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Ala Software

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

ALA Software were an obscure company from the US who defined their games as “Games with Guts”. They were part of a mother company called ALA Enterprises (which was a record label). All software was written by General Masters Corporation.

Unfortunately some of the software for the C64 never surfaced it seems, and at present the following games are missing:

  • Firestorm
  • Superbrain
  • Proton Warhead

Thanks to Marco Das, it’s been highlighted that School Tech Word Search has been found and preserved. We’ve added some scans that Marco has kindly provided. The game is also in Gamebase64.

Contributor Bryan Caudle from the Virginia Computer Museum also found a copy of Proton Warhead on sale, which confirms it does exist. We’ve added a photo here. It just needs to be preserved, so hopefully it will get picked up soon.

Basically quiz and intelligence games. Here is a scan of the advert. We are hopeful of these actually being out there, and we just need to get them digitally preserved.

Can you help us?

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 10 Comments

Ake 2

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

A little game which is a sequel to another game which never got finished. You may know the 3rd entry, which was actually finished and released in the Crap Game Compo in recent years called "Ake Goes Medievil".

Ake goes on another adventure, this time in a small sideway scrolling platformer.

Currently, nothing much goes on apart from a hard to control Ake floating around the platforms and a dead end at the end of the preview.

Featuring some reasonable graphics and some good music by Zyron, this game doesn’t really promise too much. Talking to the programmer should hopefully reveil the reasons behind this game.

Ake has another hard time, will he ever see the light of day?

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Ake

(GTW64 entry)
Posted: by Frank Gasking

The first in a series of three remarkable games, but most remarkable for the fact that only the 3rd game in the series has been finished and released at a crap game competition in recent years.

Ake starts his adventure in a game dominated by C64 Basic character set graphics, but neat little hi-res overlayed sprites, which animate fairly well.

The main character does not respond too well, and jumping is buggy, and no progress can be made past this first screen, so its assumed that this is it.

Some Christmas music plays as you try to make sense of what the game has to offer, which seems to be in the right direction in terms of sprites, but not anywhere else.

Johan will hopefully enlighten us on this game very soon, and maybe introduce us to more of the game. Watch this space.

A great character idea, but game design is missing…

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