Documenting unreleased, cancelled and prototype video games.
Covering unreleased and cancelled video games, plus prototypes and early versions of games on a variety of consoles and computers. We are a 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.
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 a freely ran project, 100% non-profitable and done in our own free time. To ensure minimum downtime, storing vast amounts of scans, downloads and information we have to pay for proper hosting.
UPDATE – All hosting costs are now covered for 2017/18, and just within a few hours! There was just a small amount left to raise, which i’ll cover. Thank you very much to Chris Abbott, Andreas Wanda and Christopher Gioconda for their help!
A full breakdown of our yearly costs can be found on our Donations page.
Please note that donations only cover our hosting/domain costs, so that we remain a purely non-profit project. Each year we will try and raise money to cover our costs. Once we hit our target, no more donations will be accepted. If donations go slightly over the target amount, then remains will go to charity.
Not quite unreleased news, but an improved A06 version of The Quill and Illustrator for the Commodore 64 has recently been preserved, after it being realised that it hadn’t yet been done. Version A05 has been around for a long time, but it had only just been noticed that the last version with an improved word parser wasn’t available.
Had another few more bits and pieces come through over the past week or so – so here is another digest of recent updates – including two new full games (Equinox + Soda Shop) that were recovered by Peepo, Tom Roger Skauen and Triad, thanks to Rich Hinton for providing the disks.
Also – check out Streethawk for two of the most detailed screenshots we’ve seen yet of the game. Discovered on the Spanish release cover for the Amstrad version of all places!
If you think the font looks familiar, then you’d be right – the same font was used eventually in Top Gun. So something of the game did surface! ;-)
Second update of the year with two new previews added to the site:
Escape from London remains added
An adventure game due for release for 2013 has now been added in what could be its final state. Full story about the game included, and sketches + artwork by John Henderson
Just a quick post to put back up the Alligata Master disks and Maniacs of Noise SFX files that we had on the old site. It seemed a shame they were tucked away out of sight – so here they are again below. Some basic details follow for each.
Way back in 2005, James Grayson contacted GTW and informed us that he some years back bought a box full of Alligata labelled floppies at a boot fair in Sheffield. A quick photo of some of the disks showed that there was possibly about 5 GTW’s there waiting to be archived. James kindly loaned GTW all of the disks to try and archive what it could in the hope of finding more GTW titles. Disks were sadly in such poor condition from their previous owner, that they would not read properly and required a week’s worth of careful cleaning and restoration to get reading again. Here are all of what we found below in the zip archive. Scans follow in the gallery.
With the Maniacs of SFX files – these were found thanks to disk copying by Pete (Myth) Baron. Due to his work with the Maniacs Of Noise with Myth, they MoN had sent Pete a disk load of music and SFX previews. Unknown to Pete, on this disk were a number of SFX demos never heard before. This included rare SFX for 2400AD and Nighthunter, but also some unused SFX in a selection of released titles like Myth and Outrun Europe. Disk image below:
First update of 2017, and a few new goodies for you to check out already. More to come soon we hope.
Two unreleased games found
Two more final findings on Ashley Routledge’s C64 disks, this time on the Compunet download disks. Firstly a preview of an unknown side scroller game, and then a full Quill adventure game.
Many thanks to you all for your support and contributions over the years. Thanks to you, we have reached a milestone today with our 2000th GTW64 entry into the archive. To celebrate we are proud to present the full game – Yogi Bear – The Big Clean Up by Hi-Tec Software.
This has been carefully reconstructed from source, with a lot of code developed from scratch to be able to bring you a complete and playable game, thanks to Martin Pugh. The special development also features new loading screen and end screen artwork by Steven Day, and a specially composed ending tune by Joachim Wijnhoven. Full story and download can be found below:
From Ashley Routledge’s work disks, we have recovered an early version of Alloyrun, when it was originally named Antaeus and was intended for Firebird.
A fixed up version of Alloyrun has also been added to the entry:
As a bonus, we have added three additional early editions of released Ash and Dave games, with mostly just title/logo differences. Some interesting curiosities to check out:
In case you didn’t see the preview news post, we were hoping to bring you two exclusive and complete unreleased Alternative Software games to download and play, as an extra bonus.
Unfortunately, there are some remaining issues that need ironing out before we can make them available. We will continue to discuss releasing them onto the site, and will hopefully see them made available in 2017.
Also – 11 new entries added
As well as the above, we have added the following new entries, which led up to the 2000th entry.
And so another year closes. I am hoping to announce a new project sometime next year, so watch this space. For now, thank you all for your support and all the best for 2017!
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.
