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.
Only a few copies were ever sold of adidas Championship Football in France by Ocean Software. A handful of copies were known to exist, but were yet to be preserved. This changed on the 22nd March thanks to Galahad, with yet another great preservation effort.
Over at the English Amiga Board, Galahad revealed that the game was secured via Paul Badham (@MrBads_Games) who brought the game on Ebay with the hope that it was the Amiga edition (but thinking it probably wasn’t). Continue reading
Described as a thinking man’s shoot-em-up, Gun Fury was a late Amiga release that was due from Binary Emotions, and to be published under the Guildhall Leisure label in 1997.
The aim of the title was simply to repel waves of alien invaders with your tank. The aliens are in various colours, and as you shoot one, your tank turns that colour and then you can only shoot another alien of the same colour. Essentially the game was very similar to Zoop, which was released on platforms including the SEGA Mega Drive. Continue reading
Although digital preservation has been happening for quite some time now, there are still many games actually released that are still very much at large. Often perhaps because some of these titles didn’t sell in great numbers in the early days, or even later days of a machine’s commercial life.
Back in the early 1990s, there was a software company called Crystal X that sold games by the homebrew developer Angela Swinbourne – a mixture of strategy and action games. A young David Crookes at the time had obtained these games, which he believes Angela sent to him, as he was in touch with a lot of PD people and home brewers at the time. Continue reading
A new recovery thanks to Retroboy – an unfinished and early bullfighting game for the C64 called ‘La Venganza del Toro’.
This has been added today into the GTW64 archives, which you can now check out for yourselves at https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/la-venganza-del-toro/
Enjoy and Happy Friday!
The graphics early on looked pretty good, showcasing a 2.5D view, and blocks could stack up too, with the characters being able to jump up onto them and give an extra level of depth to the game. The two main characters if you hadn’t guessed already, are dragons – or Dwagons, as the title suggests, going by the name of Snort and Snail. Continue reading It was recently that team member Grzegorz Antosiewicz highlighted an abandoned Amiga game which had completely passed me by last year when artist Glenn Broadway created a detailed blog post back in May 2022. The majority of information and all images have been gleaned from Glenn’s excellent post to create the entry within our archives with his permission.
Funky Monkey was the first game Glenn had worked on, which started after being invited to help with graphics for the title already in development. A friend was on a YTS placement at Images Software at the time, and this resulted in an introduction to Karl Jeffrey (the founder) and a subsequent invite.
At the time in early 1991, the game was being developed under the name of Monkey Business. This was already under way by a development team called DC Software, which was none other than developer Daniel Clapson. Continue reading
As well as titles you may well remember, we try to also cover titles which may have passed you by. Often due to how late they were to the scene or how little was actually produced. Our next title seems to have disappeared as quickly as it first appeared, in Polish magazine, Amiga Magazyn, back in the summer of 1995.
The game was called Dies Irae, and was being developed by the Polish demo group Damage. A small news article referred to the game as a Stardust clone, and looking at the screenshots, you can see why.
Dies Irae utilized ray-tracing techniques to give an impressive visual quality. It isn’t quite clear if the screenshot shown was merely a mock up, though the piece talks of a large number of smoothly animated objects and scenery to give speed to the game. Contributor Rygar confirms that it indeed was just a mock up by Dragon/Damage.
A shorter month, so our monthly update to the GTW64 archives has come round fast. This month we have 1 new entry and a total of 20 entries updated overall. Thanks to our contributors for their help and enjoy!
Balls Of The Scrolling Thunder, Black Knight 2, Blinky In America, Bod Squad 2, The, Bugs Bunny, Chainsaw Warrior, Daybreak Software titles, Dreadnought, Educational Activities, Inc. titles, Gauntlet 3, Imperial Bodyguard, Mad Crash Racing, On Table, Parasol Stars, Reader’s Digest Software, Solar Jetman, Star Maze, Sunburst Communications titles, The Attack of the Blue Bomber, Trantor 2
Richard Bayliss has been working hard the past few months to finish off an abandoned Columns clone which was infamously released into PD and onto Commodore Format’s covertape in an incomplete form around 30 years ago.
This has now been fully completed and you can download a playable version of the game, with proper scoring and with the ability for the game to end.
Check it out at: https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/blockie/
A very short entry until we can learn more, but Access Denied was a 3D game apparently programmed by the same people who did F-19 Stealth Fighter.
If that is the case, then we could be looking at the developers being:Adrian Scotney, Malcolm Hellon and/or Tim Walter
Apparently the game had been in development for around two years, and where there were two artificial intelligence’s controlling a world. You have to choose which to serve to restore peace to the world (described as being like Mercenary a little). The 3D landscapes in the game would feature lots of polygon objects to fly around, and lots of oversampled speech which was reportedly of CD quality. 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.
