Preserving Cancelled & Unreleased Video Game History Since 1999
We are an 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.
Great news, but a reprint of The Games That Weren’t book is now available for pre-order.
The Games That Weren’t chronicles 40 years of video game projects that never made it past ‘work-in-progress’. Discover more than 80 unreleased gems from the annals of gaming.
Pre-order your copy here: https://www.bitmapbooks.com/products/the-games-that-werent
According to Bitmap Books, shipments will be fulfilled in the order they were placed, starting on Monday 21st August 2023.
There were big plans with the AmigaOne, and yet another title that would be planned for it was a conversion of Echelon: The Storm. A game that was being developed by Buka Entertainment that year for the PC platform and eventually released in 2001.
The game was an aerial combat simulator with a first person view, where as well as piloting planes, you could control other vehicles too. Around 100 in total, with 100 additional objects that would appear in the game. The entire game would consist of two campaigns, each with 30 non-linear missions taking place in different weather conditions at different times of the day. Continue reading
As Commodore were desperately holding on towards the mid-1990s, the Amiga CD32 was also desperate for an injection of new and exciting titles to try and help keep everything afloat. Ocean and Digital Image Design (D.I.D) would answer the call with plans to release both T.F.X and Inferno: The Odyssey Continues on the platform.
Inferno was billed as the sequel to Epic by some magazines – even though developer Charles Wallace would later tell CD32 gamer magazine that it wasn’t really the case). It was reportedly set 90 years after the events of Epic, where you are a top pilot who has to battle the forces of good and evil.
D.I.D were looking to create an ambitious space simulator with complex and detailed 3D environments, with seven planets and three moons to explore and around 130 missions to complete (Charles later quoted 700 missions). Many magazines described it as being T.F.X (a typical jet fighter simulator) set in space, which is unsurprising considering it would be using essentially the same 3D graphics engine. Continue reading
The months are flying fast, and now its time for our July 2023 update for the GTW64 archives with two new additions, including an unnamed Andrew Braybrook game and a potential title where music was composed by Tim/Geoff Follin. We also have 16 pre-existing entries which have been updated too. Enjoy, and happy summer everyone!
Footloose, Unnamed Andrew Braybrook game
A Fi$tful of Buck$, Albedo, Alloyrun, Big Run, Braindeath, EastEnders, Fantastic Voyage, Flonk, Graham Gooch World Class Cricket, Power Prick, Rockus, Sankara Stone, Sapiens, Save Those Janitors, Stratos, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Our next entry into the archives should have maybe been posted in April, as Danny Duster’s Dirty Deeds is a game that wasn’t, but also never existed in the first place.
Crash magazine in issue 98 pulled off an elaborate April Fools prank, by printing a 3 page fake review of a made up game, complete with some reasonably convincing screenshots to depict a flick screen adventure game – not too dissimilar to the Wally Week games in style. Continue reading
Just a reminder that we have various social media outlets, where we also do regular news updates and posts from the site (as well as other prototype and unreleased games communities). If you use one of the following, then please feel free to give us a follow:
Just a very short post (and so not to replicate other’s hard work) to flag up a wonderful website which contains details on an unreleased PC conversion of Damocles.
http://mercenarysite.free.fr/pcpics.htm
If the website ever disappears, then we’ll try and see if we can host the content here instead to ensure it is safe. The site contains a number of images and video regarding the PC version that never saw release, as well as various details about the game.
The game is preserved, but the owner of the prototype does not wish to release to the community. Hopefully this situation may change in the future.
With thanks to Fever for highlighting the game on the Lemon64 forums.
Following on from our recent post about a long lost conversion of Creatures 2 for the Amiga, we now take a look at a planned ZX Spectrum conversion – and one which seemed to get relatively far… Perhaps!
Creatures took advantage of the C64’s strong graphical capabilities, and was pretty much made for the machine. It became an iconic series for the C64, with a main character that almost felt like the platform’s very own “mascot” of sorts, when SEGA had Sonic, and Nintendo having Mario. Continue reading
If you have recently joined the new Threads.net service, then you can now find Games That Weren’t on there too at gamesthatwerent or https://www.threads.net/@gamesthatwerent
Hoping a desktop version arrives soon, but we’ll keep posting out our updates to here, as well as our other social media outlets.
Due for release back in September 1993, Dino Worlds was a puzzle/strategy game, with a touch of adventure according to programmer Kevin Mullard.
In the game, you control a lone Tyrannosaurus Rex, who is trying to escape the slowly-approaching ice age. To do this, you must trek northwards through various terrains that are populated by all kinds of dinosaur, each with their own aims and attitudes. Friendly dinosaurs can be recruited and can help you in your quest to reach safety. 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.
