Games That Weren't^®

Our next entry in the archives is a simple puzzler from 1995 which is described by Gamebase as being a Mastermind style game.

To be honest, I only quickly loaded the game up to get a feel for it and a screenshot – and I wasn’t 100% sure what I was doing. It seems to be functional as a game, just lacking polish overall. The title screen does clearly state that it is just a preview at this stage.

It seemed nothing more happened after this, so we didn’t know if the game was finished or what happened next at this stage.

Contributor Gaz Spence did some great investigations, and found that the game (which we originally named as Lingo), was called Zgadula and released by the demo group Miracle in 1994. It was later cracked under the name Lingos.

It seems that the game was later finished off and overhauled, released in 1995 on CP Verlag/Magic Disk as Guesser, which you can find in Gamebase. As a result, we can safely close the case on this one.

A quick entry for a title that is nothing more than just a few intro screens and some ripped music from Myth.

The Last War Brains doesn’t give too much away about the type of game it was to be and it seems the team may have only got to develop an intro before starting any kind of development on the game itself.

Do you know anything more about it?

Roy has done some great C64 games in recent times, and Jumpy64 was one of a few in the pipeline that had some particular promise.

Jumpy64 was framed within a Game Boy style screen and made to feel like an early Game Boy title in colour. The game itself was a single screen platformer where you had to collect items and likely reach an exit – essentially a sort of Manic Miner clone.

Sadly it seems that Roy has decided to abandon this concept, and at this stage it is mostly just a concept. You can move your main character around the screen, but you can easily get out of the map and there isn’t much to do at this very early stage. It is a very early glimpse of what could have been an interesting title.

Our next title was apparently being planned for release by CP-Verlag back in 1994, but i’m not so convinced.

Jump-Kid is more of a technical demo than an actual game – plenty of polish and lovely music, but there isn’t anything to it. You just have a main character that runs along and has to jump over an enemy. Nothing else happens at this stage – with a score that goes on forever. It’s like a really simplified version of the Google Dinosaur game.

Did it get any further than this? I doubt it, but who knows? Maybe out there, there is a completely polished and fully playable game to find, or am I being overly optimistic?

No matter if we are long past the commercial days of the C64, there are still plenty of new games being produced today to make up for it. Sadly the loss of titles is still prevalent, with Jagged Sword being yet another example.

This promising arcade/RPG title has a lovely feel about it, where you can move around a simple map, visit an options screens with all your collected items and visit various locations to kill off some enemies.

It’s relatively early days in the preview, but there is quite a bit of interactivity at this stage, and you can feel a nice little game coming together. However, the preview was released back in 2012, with no further updates since – suggesting that it has been long abandoned.

Hopefully at some point we will learn more about the game and what the plans were, and what happened in the end to result in it going into the GTW archives.

Over the last year or so, I’ve been asked whether Immensity should be added to the GTW archives, as this very promising title from 2014 seems to have sadly gone completely dead. We hope however that we are wrong, and that we can instead put this into our “Still in production” section.

The game sets you within a terminal at an unknown place and with a gun in your hand. You have no idea who you are and have to explore the world and figure out various puzzles to figure it all out.

A preview was released in 2014, and it is simply stunning in its execution. The 3D effect and scaling as you move around, makes it feel like a game built in Unity/Unreal engine and with a fixed camera angle. It’s extremely well done and looks quite unlike any C64 game i’ve seen before.

Engine wise it seems to be quite advance, and I assume that all was left was mostly the content of the game to finish off. We’re not sure if it has indeed been cancelled, or just put on hold for now. Certainly we hope the latter.

If you hadn’t of guessed from the title, then FootMan is a Pac Man clone which was due for release around 1988/1989, and was a conversion of the Amiga game by Incognito.

Although seeming to get quite far with some lovely presentation and graphics, it was abandoned for reasons currently unknown.

Within the preview are quite a few mazes which load from disk, and there is possibly a level editor tucked away to create your own maps (but I was unable to activate it at the time). It plays well, though it doesn’t offer too much more than the original game to be fair.

Interestingly Adam Gilmore is listed as the musician, though there is no music or sound effects within the game. In HVSC is a tune called “Jingles” dated from 1988 which perhaps was for this game?

Do you know anything more about it?

Found within the Gamebase archives recently, this is an early preview from 1992 of yet another abandoned game, and one which seems to be a potentially interesting twist on breakout/pong.

Flex isn’t anything to write home about, but has a nice smooth feel about it, where it seems the aim is to try and destroy enemies with the ball within a time limit. Not sure what the open gap is at the top.

It’s nicely presented, and with a bit more depth it could have been a nice little magazine cover game. Why was it cancelled? We have no idea at this stage, but with the names of the developer and artists – we hope to eventually find out.

Another title in the archives which was due out in the post-commercial era of the C64, with a simple RPG title in the shape of Eelona – The Warrior Princess.

This seems to have been abandoned very early on, and there is some small character interaction within the preview, but not much else going on at this stage. It looks as if there is still plenty of work needed to finish the title.

We don’t know much more about it at this stage and what the plans were, but hope to find out soon.

Do you know anything more about this game?