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.
Bug Off is a 2018 title inspired by Galencia, developed after Marcel Lansing saw Jason’s game and felt inspired to create something with a similar impact.
Having worked on various titles across different Commodore machines, Marcel set out to develop Bug Off as a port of The End by Stern – an arcade game where aliens swoop down to steal bricks and spell out “THE END”.
Development began back in 2018, unusually starting with the loader, intro, title screen and game over sequence – with the gameplay itself left until last. As time went on, Marcel found the project increasingly complex, and eventually motivation waned before completion.
Despite this, the game reached a relatively complete state, featuring functional gameplay with descending enemies and an impressive mothership battle. However, Marcel himself feels the gameplay still needs refinement and isn’t quite up to the standard he envisioned.
Visuals were created by John “Hend” Henderson, and the soundtrack by Richard Bayliss. Although Marcel once considered auctioning a single physical copy of the game for exclusivity, this idea was shelved due to the contributions of other artists.
At present, Marcel isn’t looking to release the game either in a finished or unfinished state – due to lack of motivation, but also partly due to concerns about the cracking scene, and not wanting to see an unprotected version distributed with added intros or modifications. Hend also plans to reuse some of the graphical assets in future productions.
While the situation might change in the future, Bug Off remains unreleased for now. Any glimpse of it comes via the surviving visuals and soundtrack – a promising but shelved creation from a developer who clearly poured a lot into it.
A short entry for a title that may or may not have ever been released.
This was an expansion pack that would add 10,000 new words for Magic Voice with disk-accessible libraries – where apparently vulgarities would not be included!
Do you know anything more about it and can you help preserve it?
A short entry for an educational title starting the ominous sounding BJ the Bear, and due for release in 1984 by Commodore with support for the Magic Voice cartridge.
A short entry for an educational title starting the ominous sounding BJ the Bear, and due for release in 1984 by Commodore with support for the Magic Voice cartridge.
A very short entry for a game that doesn’t seem to have got very far at all. Well, it has got to a sort of title screen/sprite demo at this stage.
This was a racing game called Mega Race, which was due out in 1987 from a developer called Michael Svendsen.
Not much is given away about the game apart from the sprites, and that more were being designed and a layout was being thought out. We’re wondering if it ever got anywhere beyond this initial demo?
A very short entry for something which probably isn’t a proper game and was never intended as such. This is a parody on the 1942 and 1943 games, which the author clearly states they hate.
So they created this short demo which doesn’t really have anything to do at all with two very simple hi-res planes.
Its listed as a preview, but we think this is pretty much it and no full game was ever intended. Adding to the archives just for posterity.
One of the great things with hunting for unreleased games, is that they can turn up under the oddest of circumstances. When Hedning/Genesis Project got in touch to say he had found something surprising in a collection of Dutch disks, this was certainly a case of just that!
Dominion is not to be confused with the Zzap64! cover tape game of the same name, but is a sideways scrolling Delta-style shooter by the programmers of Master Blaster and Black Tiger, Mark Hughes and James Doyle. The game wasn’t really known about, but the clues were there thanks to a music demo released by Mark Tait back in the day.
After creating Master Blaster and whilst the game was being shopped around to publishers, Mark and James got to work on creating Dominion, enlisting Stephen Chandler and Peter Wolfe on graphics. Dave Baxter (a producer at Elite who then set up Micro Media) arranged for Mark Tait to do the music, but after pitching the game around – no publisher was interested unfortunately.
Dave would end up moving to U.S. Gold and got the group to convert Black Tiger, and Dominion was swiftly forgotten about for many years. That is – until a set of Dutch disks were being processed, and Hedning came across the file and initially got in touch with GTW to see if we knew anything about the game at all (which we wouldn’t have done).
Thankfully, before we could confirm anything – Hedning was able to get hold of Mark Hughes to confirm the story about the game which has been relayed above. A full creators speaks from Mark can be found below as well telling the story.
So, after over 35 years, this long lost game has been recovered, and you can play it for yourself! It is complete too – so check it out for yourself!
A short entry for a title that was flagged up in the brilliant Gremlin In the Works book, where Martin Fowler talked of working on a 2D snooker game endorsed by Stephen Hendry for Zeppelin Software that was being worked on by him and Tony Reeves at Dreamscape Designs.
The game was being developed for Commodore 64, Amiga and Atari ST and got to a 75% complete stage overall. Unfortunately, around the time – Archer Maclean released Jimmy White’s Whirlwind Snooker and Zeppelin failed to secure Stephen’s name for the game (as he won the World Championship that year and became too expensive).
Zeppelin wouldn’t fund the development any further, and so the game was ultimately cancelled and never saw the light of day. The question is whether anything may still exist today, so we hope to learn more in the near future!
Our next entry into the GTW archives is a slightly controversial title due to its rather risqué advertisement that featured in the Italian press at the time. Ifigonia was an erotic/adult themed text adventure, with graphics created by artist Mauro Mazza. The game was based on a poem from 1928.
After a few adverts for the ZX Spectrum, C64 and Amstrad CPC – the game disappeared without a trace, and some even wondered if it was a hoax of some kind. One magazine (Sperimentare) showed a rather different looking cover-art case and talked about the game. We don’t think they actually review it, as the details about the title are quite vague. It is mentioned though that the graphics would be a mixture of comic-like graphics and animations throughout.
The question is whether the game actually ever saw completion or release on any of the three platforms overall? At the moment, there is no evidence of any copies sneaking out – but who knows, perhaps one or two did manage it.
There is a general feeling that it was nothing more than a sophisticated April Fools joke, though the address for the company did exist and you could send off money to order the game. Damiano Gerli confirmed that the address was a computer shop that was in Milan back in the day. He’s 90% sure that the game was just a hoax or April Fools to get people to go into the shop to ask for the game.
Quattro Bit felt that the selling price was far too low, and in all their years of research – never heard of anyone ordering it. GilesGoat feels that the fact you could send off money to someone for *something* suggests that there had to be a product, otherwise it would have been stealing. The plot thickens! :)
If you know anything more about the title or can help us preserve it – please do get in touch.
A very quick entry for a game called The Pacman Strikes Back, where at the moment we have a very early title screen test thanks to Csaba Virág, who found remains of the game on a work disk originally from Csaba Einspach.
Although nothing is playable in the executable, there may be remains of the game lurking within the little source files that are present. Apparently there is a more complete and playable version out there somewhere, but sadly Csaba Einspach’s media was lost many moons ago.
The plan was to sell the game to Mastertronic in 1987, but never quite happened. Hopefully more will be recovered in the future.
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.
