Preserving Cancelled & Unreleased Video Game History Since 1999
Welcome to Games That Weren't!
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.
Side scrolling shooters are a popular genre on the C64, and Squad Force Five is adding to the proof of that. A game that was in development around 2011.
The HUD, sprites and attack waves all look pretty good – though at this stage there seems to be no backgrounds or anything like that, which feels a bit odd.
It’s playable to the point that you can shoot enemies, but its still very much early days for the game.
The question is whether the game ever got any further than this demo, or if that was it. Hopefully someone will be able to shed some light.
Space Ball is a simple but neat puzzler game, slightly similar to Sensitive in some ways – where you bounce on a set of tiles. As you move though, holes appear around you rather than behind/under you and you have to keep moving whilst avoiding the holes to build up a score.
There’s not too much to it so far, but its actually quite fun to play at this early stage. Unfortunately it was long abandoned back in 1995 it seems with no further updates.
Did it get any further than this? We don’t know at this stage, but hope that some day we’ll find the developers to learn more about the title.
The Sixth Sense doesn’t seem to be anything to do with the film that appeared a few years later, but is a neat looking Dungeon Master style game from 1993 with a cool blue effect throughout.
You can currently wander around the map and go through a few doors by the looks of it, but not much else at this stage. We’re not sure if this early preview is all that ever was made of the game, or if there is more to potentially find in the future.
Programmer and artist details are unknown, though the musicians are known – so its hoped that they might be able to shed some light on this game and who it was being produced by.
Rip Off is a very simple single screen shooter that feels more of a technical demo than an actual game at this stage.
There’s a simple ship at the bottom, and just a standard attack wave that swoops in and out, which you cannot seem to shoot properly. Efforts seem to have gone into the weapons, but the game isn’t playable at the moment.
Released back in 1996, there has been no further update to the preview – suggesting that this game has been long abandoned.
Yet another scrolling shooter goes into the archives, and one from way back in 1990.
Phantasm is a pretty neat looking shooter, which seems to have gone a long way before its cancellation. The preview consists of two levels in total and plenty of polish so far. The final game would have had up to 6 levels in total.
We assume that the game simply failed to find a publisher, and so it was assigned to the scrap heap. It’s a shame, as it looks pretty good at this early stage.
Hopefully some day we’ll hear from the developers about the title and what happened exactly.
A like a good shoot-em up, and Proxima is right up my street as a result. A sideways scrolling shooter with some nice parallax effects.
It’s very early days, but you can shoot enemies and move around the looping level to get a feel of where the game was potentially going.
The preview was released back in 2011, and sadly doesn’t seem to have moved from its current status. After so much time passing, we can only assume it was cancelled long ago.
If you know anything more about this game, please let us know.
Paku Paku is another stab at trying to bring an accurate conversion of Pac Man to the C64, and its not too bad at this early stage.
It’s not entirely accurate, but it plays well and looks good – with some good sounds that sort of replicate the original arcade machine. It’s certainly playable at this stage and gives you a good game.
Unfortunately it was never properly completed, and was released as a preview back in 2012 for people to check out. A shame, as this certainly was shaping up very well.
Thanks to contributor Professor Chaos (see comments), we learn from the author’s website at https://deathshadow.com/ that the game is no longer in active development, and was to prove to himself that they could learn 6502 machine language in a week. A huge shame them that it seems this will progress no further.
I was slightly disappointed when loading up this amazing looking preview, of what I hoped was going to be an accurate and fun conversion of the classic arcade.
Although it looks amazing, its sadly not playable at this stage at all – and you can just move a very slow Pac Man around some of the maze without being able to eat anything. Ghosts are also static.
Sadly this seems to have completely stalled and not progressed any further, which is a shame – as i’d really like to see someone do an arcade accurate port and using all the tricks in the book to achieve the same look and feel.
If there is more to this one, then we’d love to see it!
A very bizarre title which seems to have had more effort put into the game logo than the actual game itself.
To say this is a game is stretching it quite far – as really its just a demo, with a controllable yellow fish that doesn’t really do anything at all and a strange sea creature that goes past about its business.
That is it! There is no game and I doubt it ever progressed any further than this either. If you know anything about this bizarre bit of code – please let us know.
Outbreak is a decent stab at a clone of Dr. Mario on the C64, which was due for release by the short-lived C64 label Flimsoft back in 2013.
The game seems to have been pretty much mostly running, just lacking on some final polish and more levels. It is playable and plays much like the Game Boy original.
I think Flimsoft didn’t last too long, so this likely resulted in the game being cancelled – which is a shame. Would have been nice to see it finished off regardless and maybe picked up by someone else.
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