Unreleased & Cancelled Video Games across many platforms.
We are an Unreleased and Cancelled 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 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 video game history since 1999.
Several years ago, whilst preserving The Soul Gem Or Martek for the Commodore 64, we also scanned in some brochures and a club magazine from Anirog software. These don’t seem to be online anywhere, so we have added a page here to share this history with you.
They give a fascinating insight to what the company was releasing at the time and behind the scenes a little with its club magazine. We hope you enjoy them via the galleries below.
Already we have seen a few entries into Games That Weren’t which are arcade releases that were being done by console/home computer software companies, such as Zool, Fire and Forget 2 and The Living Daylights. However, Germany’s Rainbow Arts was also to get in on the act back in 1989.
The publisher had produced its very own arcade motherboard called Pluto, which offered 128 colours per scan line and per playfield and with a resolution up to 640×480 pixels. Up to 50 million pixels could be moved per second, and there would be hardware zoom and turning features available.
All of this was coupled with a 32-bit processor at 15mhz, 16-channel stero sound and an I/O expansion area for hardware additions in the future. Continue reading
A fantastic game which I have very fond memories playing on my Commodore 64, Myth: History in the Making was due to be revived by System 3 for the Sony PlayStation and various other platforms back in 1998.
Sporting what seems to be a similar engine to The Last Ninja (also in production around the same time), the game got hit with delays due to a dispute with Eidos regarding the name ‘Myth’ (of which Eidos had released a game of a similar name on the PC by Bungie Software). In one news snippet in Extreme PlayStation Magazine, it is suggested that the Eidos game would tarnish the name of ‘Myth’ for System 3. Continue reading
Thank you to everyone for their continued support to Games That Weren’t this past year, as we conclude with our yearly update (and larger than our usually monthly update). Plenty to digest and check out and hope you enjoy it!
A little Christmas present to you all, thanks to Sailor and Taper of Triad. This is a game based loosely on ideas from Dropzone and Wizball, and was developed by Chris Young.
This release and update is dedicated to our friend Jason Kelk, who passed away in June this year and who was originally going to tidy up the game for GTW to release.
Breathless is a FPS game for the Amiga that was released in late 1995, and was shown in the press a lot at the time over the years.
As a result, there were a number of early screens and demos that had features that didn’t make it into the final game. Grzegorz Antosiewicz has kindly gone through various demos and magazine previews to highlight some of those differences below. Continue reading
Following on from the addition of Fabrizio Bartoloni to the GTW team, we now welcome another three members who have made many a contribution to the archive:
This was as a result of having all three as regular contributors who should be recognised better for all their help. You can read more about how they are helping with the GTW archive on our team page at https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/about/the-team/
A big welcome to Karl, Grzegorz and Ross and thank you for all your help so far!
It’s been a while since we added some VIC-20 games to the archive, so here we are, with some quick entries to bolster up the slowly growing archive. This week we have added the following:
A short entry until we can confirm that there was indeed a Commodore VIC-20 conversion.
Alien Garden was a computer generated art game, where you control an embryonic life-form that you must try and help survive and reproduce across 20 generations through trial and error.
A very early game that was released by Epyx on the Atari 400/800 in 1982, some sites suggest that a VIC-20 edition was available or planned – but there is very little detail at present.
Has it therefore just been incorrectly attributed as a platform?
With thanks to Fabrizio Bartoloni and Ward F. Shrake.
A short entry for yet another Commodore Vic-20 title that was reported on the Vic-20 Cartridge Rarity list and may well be unreleased, or otherwise saw a very limited release.
Necromancer was a popular C64 game released by Synapse, but a Vic 20 version was mentioned in an advert in December 1983 of Compute! Gazette in the US. Was it a printing mistake, and did they mean the C64? Or did a Vic-20 conversion really exist?
The game of course was released on the likes of the Atari 400/800 and Commodore 64, so its possible (as Avram suggests in the comments) that Bill Williams will know more of the Vic 20 conversion.
If you know anything more, please let us know.
With thanks to Fabrizio Bartoloni and Avram Dumitrescu.
DISCLAIMER: We are a non-profit digitisation project, aiming to digitally preserve software and history which would otherwise be lost for good. If for any reason there is anything that you do not wish to be on the website, please contact us for removal.
Games That Weren't® is the registered trademark of Frank Gasking.
