Preserving Cancelled & Unreleased Video Game History Since 1999
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.
A nice looking Tetris clone that was produced back in 1994 but sadly never got much further than its preview that sneaked out.
Not too much to say apart from that it looks nice and plays ok, but still a bit of work to go to put into a polished final piece.
Did it get any further than this, or was it abandoned around this stage? If you know anything more, please let us know.
Another combined entry for a series of titles from K-TEK Software, which may or may not have been released. At present the following titles are missing:
Can you help us find these titles and see them preserved?
With thanks to Bertrand / Atari Frog from http://www.atarimania.com for flagging up the titles, Paladin for finding and preserving Wolf Attack and Allan Pinkerton for finding and preserving Stomp Ground, Sky Diving and Crystal Mountain!
Another combined entry for a series of titles from Daybreak Software, which may or may not have been released. At present the following titles are missing:
Can you help us find these titles and see them preserved?
With thanks to Bertrand / Atari Frog from http://www.atarimania.com for flagging up the titles.
A new and strange unfinished title which was found by Csaba Virag, created by someone in Hungary called Osvath in 1987.
This is a very simple Pong style title which is far from finished, with just some basic ball mechanics working, but only one player in the middle and no collision detection.
This may likely have just been a small personal development project that never went any further. It would be interesting to learn if it ever got any further. Hopefully Osvath will see his work here some day and be able to comment.
A short entry for now for a title that was developed for PSS by David Bolton (who had created titles such as Johnny Reb II for MC Lothlorien.
Unfortunately the title cannot be recalled, but this was a title developed in 1988 and is believed to be unpublished. There does not seem to be any titles that match the description – if you find anything, please let us know.
David described the game as follows:
“It was about Robots fighting and scavenging metal on a planet and building new robots. It had 24 sprites (multiplexing) and used all 64KB RAM.”
Sadly David no longer has anything of the game, so it is hoped that something sent to PSS may turn up someday. Or that we discover that the game was released in a different form.
Ok, its a bit of a stretch, but could there have been a C64 conversion of the arcade wrestling title Mat Mania?
Well, if you look at the Taito intro for the US version of Operation Wolf, you’ll see an arcade alley which has a series of games which all have C64 releases, except for Mat Mania.
Was this therefore a clue to a conversion that was in the works? Well, contributor PatmanQC suggests that this could well be a good suggestion to one. Or was this just merely a random game picked to put in the line up?
The game did see a release on the Atari 7800, but that seems to be the only version that was available in the end.
Do you know anything more about about a potential conversion? If so, please get in touch!
Not to be confused with the game City Fighter by Mastertronic, this was a simple arcade action game that was due for release on ZX Spectrum and C64 back in 1984 from Choice Software.
Sadly only the ZX Spectrum version seems to have been released, with the game’s developer David Bolton confirming that the C64 edition is currently lost (although he suggests on his webpage that it did). BBC and Lynx versions were to come soon as well, but these also seem to have been scrapped.
Hopefully it is something that he may stumble across one day on an old disk or tape and that we can arrange for it to be digitally preserved.
If you have a copy, please get in touch!
Our next entry into the GTW64 archives is a title that was recovered by Csaba Virag in early 2022. This is an early Hungarian puzzler that was created by Emix Software, who had very limited copies of their games made at home.
The title is very simple, and the aim is to try and move boxes into spaces on the grid. However, your cursor/person that moves the boxes is invincible and you have to try and figure out where you are roughly by moving around and hoping you move a box.
I’ve listed this as a preview, as its quite rough around the edges and lacks some polish (plus there only seems to be around 8 levels). It could be that this was the final version of the game though, but we’ll update if we learn more in the future.
Thanks to Csaba you can now check out yet more Hungarian C64 history now preserved.
A quick entry into GTW64 archives that was recovered by Csaba Virag in early 2022. This is a simple SEUCK effort that was to be sold commercially in Hungary back in the late 1980s by Emix Software, who had very limited copies of their games made at home.
As SEUCK games go, this isn’t very polished at all and isn’t one of the better titles seen created in the package. It comes with an intro screen and tune and of course, it doesn’t seem to have been preserved until now.
This may well have actually been sold, but just in very limited numbers. Hopefully we will get confirmation of this at some point soon.
A new GTW finding thanks to the preservation efforts of GTW regular Csaba Virag. This is an obscure German game which was created in 1986 by Michael Wuest, is the same developer who went on to code AmigaFox (an Amiga conversion of Printfox).
It is quite a simple game overall, with some ripped Rob Hubbard music, and what just seems to be the simple aim of shooting items on a conveyor belt. It seems that if you hit the wrong items, then it is game over.
Michael kindly got in touch via the comments to confirm that the game was not done for commercial reasons, but was done for a friend called März (which is March in English). Michael has no idea how the game came to sneak out into the wild.
He also did a bunch of releases like AmigaFox, GE (Versions 1-5), some Automation stuff (AlertWerks 3000) and some other things. But Maerz 1-3 have never been made official – though we hope we may see 1 and 3 in the future.
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