Games That Weren't^®

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.

Lovely and promising is a way of describing Minimus, which was in development back in 2012.

The preview that has managed to sneak out shows a decent animated main character who can jump around a sideways scrolling platform world, and moves very well in a fluid way. Although it is nothing more than a character test, with no enemies or other interactions – it is a good solid demo that indicates that this had a lot of promise.

It is possible that the title did get a bit further than this, but nothing has been forthcoming since the original preview release.

Why was it abandoned? We don’t know just yet. Maybe you can help us shed some light on it and what the plans were?

A quick entry for a very cool looking single screen car game, where you simply have to avoid each other for as long as you can whilst the game speeds up.

This version was produced for a party back in 2014, and did promise things like scores, sounds etc. but seems to have since been forgotten about. There isn’t much too it overall and it won’t keep you hooked for hours, but its always a shame seeing any C64 game thrown on the scrapheap.

Thanks to an anonymous contributor, we have learnt that the game was first developed and released on the Amiga, and a C64 edition was mentioned as coming soon on an EAB thread.

Development team was listed, and could well be the same team as behind the C64 edition, so we’ve added the credits for now.

Do you know anything more about it?

First of all, this isn’t an official conversion of the classic SNES/Amiga title The Lost Vikings, but a homebrew effort from 2016 that had an initially promising start – but then just disappeared with no more updates.

The preview you can find here shows one of the game maps converted, and a character that you can move around the map (though there isn’t any collision on at this stage). There is nothing to interact with, and its more of a technical demo than anything.

Still – it looks promising, and it is a shame that nothing more has come of it. Hopefully at some point we will find out a bit more about the development and why it was decided to cancel it.

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?