Games That Weren't^®

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.

Do you know anything more about this game?

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.

Do you know anything more about it?

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.

GTW team member Gaz Spence took a bit of a deep dive and found the following:

“The 1994 release looks like the most complete version, including the intro, a slightly different title screen, and a new gameplay element (holding down fire creates a force-field). Oddly, the 2004 release seems to be the earliest build but does include stills of more background graphics, and the 1990 release seems to fall somewhere in between. Sadly nothing major to add but it had the potential to be a nifty little shooter.”

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.

Case closed?

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.

Check it out for yourself and see what you think.

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.