Documenting unreleased, cancelled and prototype video games.
Covering unreleased and cancelled video games, plus prototypes and early versions of games on a variety of consoles and computers. We are a large archive dedicated to preserving games that were never released to the public. Sharing history and stories from the developers, assets and more before it is too late.
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.
A neat sounding RPG that was being produced by Seven Stars for the PC and Commodore Amiga back in 1995. The game was highlighted to us thanks to LiqMatrix.
Early PC demo that has managed to sneak out
Seven Stars was based in Poland and had produced a number of games, including Kajko i Kokosz and Desert Wolf which were released the same year. Martwa Strefa (Dead Zone) had the following story within a news snippet in a Polish magazine:
“A prison escapee goes to a deserted bunker base and tries to unravel the mystery of the disappearance of all its staff. The task is so difficult that the base is under surveillance by aggressive combat robots ready to fight …” Continue reading →
Amberstar was a great RPG title released on the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST and PC back in 1992 by Thalion, and was to be part of a trilogy that was never to be. However, a sequel was created at least in the shape of Ambermoon, and released for the Commodore Amiga in 1993, but not two other platforms that we are about to explore.
Just as an aside, there was an unofficial third game in the form of Albion, which was being developed as a sequel to Ambermoon at Thalion, before it closed its doors and the work was transferred over to Blue Byte.
Though back to Ambermoon for our next entry, where there was planned to be not only an Amiga version, but PC DOS and Atari ST editions at one stage. Interestingly, in the December 1991 issue of Power Play magazine in Germany, they talk about the new Amberstar game due to be released that Christmas. Continue reading →
Our next VIC-20 entry is sadly one only announced in recent years as a new development. A conversion of System 3’s classic one-on-one fighter International Karate.
Started in 2017 by Eric Hilaire and announced on the Vic 20 Denial forums, the conversion would require an 1024KB Ultimem cartridge to be able to run and hold around 186 large software sprites and features.
The sprites were stored as data, with 4 copies of each of the sprites 2 pixels-shifted and with their corresponding masks. The sprite data would also take up 300kb unpacked.
Eric posted some screenshots of his progress, and also an early video – and it was looking pretty good overall.
It isn’t sure how the music would have been handled exactly, but we suspect there would have been a conversion of Rob Hubbard’s famous music. The graphics would be ported from the C64 and tidied up at a later date too. The video above shows a very early set of placeholder graphics.
Unfortunately, Eric decided to cancel the development in 2020 after losing motivation on the project, due mostly to comments about the choice of requiring Ultimem to run the game.
Eric was asked about releasing remains of the development, but doesn’t wish to do so. It is hoped that he may decide to return to the project some day.
Sometimes we need to be more mindful of what a privilege it is to still see new VIC 20 games being produced today, no matter the hardware requirements.
With thanks to Fabrizio Bartoloni for flagging up.
Wing Star was the start of a new journey for developer Martin Piper, though he didn’t quite know it at the time. As you might well guess, the game was heavily inspired by the recent release of Star Fox (Star Wing in some places) on the Super Nintendo in 1992.
Owner of an Archimedes, Martin and his childhood friend Alan Peters, decided to see if they could make something similar on the platform and started to create a tech demo in late 1992. It wasn’t planned to be a full on clone of Star Fox, which of course would have resulted in all kinds of legal issues. Continue reading →
A few quick early screens that have been spotted by Martin Inter recently, in particular for the C64 conversions of Robocop, Predator and R-Type in Zzap Italia.
Predator and R-Type are quite small oddities, but for Robocop, in the Zzap Italia review was a factory level with a very different looking background with different colours and also doors not present in the final game:
With Predator, there are some early screens with slightly different graphics and no score panel at all: Continue reading →
Just a quick post to say thank you to the contributor today who passed on some information regarding some C64 titles. They didn’t leave a proper email/name for credit, so hence this post.
Most appreciated, and I’ll update the relevant pages + add new content sometime next week.
Platforms: Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft XBOX 360, PC and Mac
Released eventually in 2013 as The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, the game was a long and troubled development overall, having started way back in 2006.
GTW staff member Ross Sillifant dug out some screens from a GamesTM magazine article which shows a few screens during the transition phase over from XCOM to The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, where the game moved from a first person shooter to a more tactical-based game. 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.
