Preserving Cancelled & Unreleased Video Game History Since 1999
Welcome to Games That Weren't!
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.
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.
Oolong is a game which seems to be based on the character from Yie Ar Kung-Fu, and when you play this early preview – its clear to see that the entire game is based on that arcade.
The moves are quite similar to the original game, and you have the option of playing against a second player. It’s still rough around the edges, but its a decent early effort so far which could have been something quite nice overall.
The preview was released back in 2013, and nothing has since happened to it – suggesting that it has well and truly stalled for good. A shame, as the C64 could do with some fresh new fighting games.
Mr. Pilic is a game from 2011 that seems to be a Manic Miner clone of sorts, but not currently playable (at least I wasn’t able to control anything). There’s a dog that moves left and right and some ladders, but no interaction at this stage.
The developer Peter Vass got in touch via the comments and confirmed that the game was actually finished and released and can be downloaded from his website at http://c64.yolasite.com/
Motorman is an impressive clone of Excitebike from the NES, and looks really good at this early stage.
The bikes animate very well, and you can do jumps and avoid various obstacles against a few other computer players. It’s even got a functioning two player mode as well. So the question is whether a single player mode would have been full screen – that would have been cool :)
The preview was released back in 2015, and sadly seems to have since stalled. It is hoped that the game will be picked up once more and completed, but after so much time – it seems that the developer may have moved on from this one.
Developed way back in 1996, Misfire was to be a neat two player split screen battle in the style of Solar Jetman/Thrust, where you must fly around a map to find each other and destroy each other.
The preview released back then is very solid, with a title screen and various options and a few maps to play on. It’s playable to a degree, though only if you have two players at this stage. It is unknown whether a computer player would have been considered in the end.
The game itself has a note to any potential publishers who might have been interested, suggesting the game could have been earlier than 1996 (maybe this was just the time of the crack release). Sadly it seems no-one took them up.
With credits known, it is hoped we will learn more soon about this game and if it ever got any further than this preview.
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