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.
As we near the middle of 2024, work continues in the Commodore 64 archive of Games That Weren’t, with more new entries added and also 23 titles updated in total. Much more on the way too for next month! (Apologies to Anonymous Contributor, whose recent set of new contributions I’ll add for next month).
A very short entry for a title that has been flagged up by Ross Sillifant and mentioned by RJ Mical in an old Atari Lynx interview back in Electronic Gaming Monthly (issue 4).
RJ mentions the following when talking about the sprites, and mentions a ‘unique golf’ game which doesn’t seem to have ever seen the light of day:
“Lynx programmers can also produce unlimited sprites (at any given size) for their games. In other words, you can have any number of moving objects on the screen, and they can be as large as you want them to be. Epyx is currently developing a unique golf game, where the player sees things as the ball might see them (once it has been hit).
This program features over 700 sprites, while the average home computer game usually contains several dozen sprites. After examining these statistics, it’s easy to see that our golf game displays an incredible amount of detail. Here is another point of interest: the maximum clock speed of the unit is 16 Mhz. This means that the Epyx game system operates faster than any other video game console ever made.”
Our next entry into the GTW archives comes courtesy of Anonymous Contributor, who had been digging into details on Winnetou for the Commodore 64 and found a stack of new information on the Rainbow Arts game.
However, when the Rainbow Arts game died a death and disappeared off the face of the earth, another title from the Karl May series would be marked as coming soon from Software 2000, with Der Schatz Im Silbersee (or ‘The Treasure of Silver Lake’ for the English translation). This would be a few years later in 1993, when adverts began popping up in German gaming magazines. Continue reading →
A short entry for a Java Platform mobile de-make of the classic Super Monkey Ball. It is not currently known if the development ever got further than just a few mock up screens.
In 2024, ex-Ocean Software artist Bill Harbison would provide Games That Weren’t with a series of mock-up screens that were produced to show how the game could look on the platform, depicting a very Marble Madness’esq design overall where you would have to collect a series of bananas. Continue reading →
Frame City Killer was announced back in May 2005 as a next-generation action adventure game for the Xbox 360, utilizing the new upcoming Unreal 3 engine and consisting of immersive and non-linear gameplay. The intention was to try and release the game in time for the system’s launch – but things were not to go to plan.
Press release screenshot courtesy of Gamersyde.
GTW takes a look at the title, thanks to help and input from gaming historian John Szczepaniak. The game story had you controlling a secret agent named ‘Crow’, who has to hunt down a criminal drug lord. A press release from Namco at the time gave a bit more detail and background overall:
“Set in a futuristic metropolis in East Asia, ‘Frame City Killer’ casts players as Crow, an assassin sent to Frame City to identify and eliminate Khan – a mysterious terrorist and head of a deadly new-age drug cartel.
As a hit man, players track and profile targets, while utilizing numerous methods to execute the perfect hit. ‘Frame City Killer’ offers players a dark and gritty storyline, thrilling car chases and a variety of ways for players to achieve their goals.”
Our next title is an interesting looking side-on action RPG title that was due for release on the PC Engine by Intec around 1992 time.
A few mentions were made in PCEngineFan over the years, which included two screenshots showing a forest scene where you fight against some bad guys, and then face a large wolf-like boss. Continue reading →
Thanks to Fabrizio Bartoloni for flagging up, but Atari Mania have recently announced recovery of four games by General Masters Corporation for the Atari 400/800 which apparently were never released. Mike Burkhart kindly dumped the games in 2022:
Whilst working to recover the late Archer Maclean’s work disks, we discovered a few things which surprised us. As well as games, Archer also did a bit of freelance development work outside of games – including this oil demonstration for old British Oil company Carless.
According to Archer’s C.V, it was November 1983 that he decided to become a freelance programmer to earn a reasonable income. The very first job he would secure was to produce an animated graphics demonstration program for Carless. Continue reading →
A short entry for a Java Platform mobile conversion of a classic platformer title that many of us know and love. Nebulus (or Tower Toppler as known in other regions) was about to be playable on the go thanks to Player One Limited, who announced the game in 2006.
Being developed in J2ME, unfortunately the conversion would disappear quickly without a trace and never surfaced for reasons currently unknown. Continue reading →
Games That Weren’t has been running for a quarter of a century this year, which is not only staggering, but also a bit scary if I’m honest. For 25 years (much longer if you count preservation work before the online archive), we have been documenting and preserving as much unreleased software as we can for a variety of platforms. Though it all began with just the Commodore 64 at the start, the machine I grew up with and still play today.
When first starting out, I never quite expected this to be a project with no end in sight (which isn’t great for someone who has ‘completist‘ elements to their personality), but that is indeed exactly what Games That Weren’t is. No matter how many games we manage to save and preserve their stories, we will never capture them all, and tragically there will be many that are forever lost.
There are so many unreleased games out there, and quite often I get people get in touch and ask “Why haven’t you covered X game on the site?“, and probably always will do. Regardless of scrambling to try and cover what we can, it has been a fun and exciting 25 years of trying to do as much as possible during our free time to preserve gaming history.
To mark this milestone, I thought I’d share how everything started and gradually progressed over the years, including some of our highlights and major findings along the way. Separately I’ve done a video covering the same sort of thing in a more visual way, if you need boring monotonous ramblings to send you calmly to sleep.
The article that started it all (click to view on archive.org).
As has been well documented in the past (and to death!) on our About page, it was Ian Osborne’s “That Was The Game That Wasn’t” article that first inspired interest in the area of unreleased games to a young 11 year old version of myself. I was surprised to learn that there were games being made, and sometimes even completed, which we apparently had no chance of being able to play. The fact that we supposedly couldn’t play them, made me more curious and wanting to know exactly what those games were like. Were we missing a potential classic of our time, or had we been spared for instance? Continue reading →
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.
