Preserving Cancelled & Unreleased Video Game History Since 1999
Welcome to Games That Weren't!
We are an 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.
A very short entry for an unknown Football game that was possibly in development or to be developed by Mike Lyons.
Basically, we found a set of sprites on a utilities disk, which Mike isn’t very sure about their origins. He certainly doesn’t recall ever working on a football game.
They could be from the time he was working at Maelstrom, Active Minds or even briefly Denton Designs. I did wonder if they were anything to do with the World Class Rugby game that Denton had done, but they don’t quite match up.
If anyone recognises them at all – please do let us know. Perhaps there is a game out there to be discovered?
A short entry now for yet another Elite game that never quite made it, even though it was advertised in magazines at the time for both Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum.
Grand National of course was based on the famous Aintree horse racing event, and Elite had a game which was promising the following:
Strategy – You study the form
Planning – You choose your napp
Tension – You place your bet
Action – You ride your mount
Reward – The acclaim of winning the World’s Greatest Steeplechase
Advertised in 1985, only the ZX Spectrum version would see a release – but there was nothing to surface for the Commodore 64.
Did it get far, and was it done by Chris Harvey, Neil A. Bate and Rory Green perhaps? If you know anything more, then please do get in touch.
Following on from the recent look at the strange earlier (or later?) version of Super Hang On with larger bikes but less of them, Martin/Stadium64 highlights that there was a strange late US release which was to include a Commodore 64 edition.
Advertised as late as 1991, it was due for release in Summer 1991 (which is very late for a Commodore 64 release in the US). The game was however already promoted in a 1989 catalogue too. See gallery below.
So why not just release the Euro version? Well, that could be pretty obvious. Either they were developing a new version, or they just hadn’t anticipated how bad the UK version was before deciding to actually cancel the release.
Martin looked at the US box releases online, and it seems like Data East produced at least 2 different boxes. One has PC & Amiga screenshots on back, whilst the other has Macintosh screenshots. And at least one of them seems to have Commodore 64 system information – on the box front/long side. The Orange part present on several other C64 Data East releases.
In the gallery, you can see parts of that orange bit it on some of the pictures that Martin has provided. One front box – you can see the orange part behind the Amiga Sticker. So seems at least that a Commodore 64 box was produced.
So the question is whether a different development was started, or if it had been planned to use the Euro version all along (before they saw what it was like). One theory from Martin is that perhaps Enduro Racer V2 was intended to be the enhanced game.
Check the entry, but Nick Pelling oddly put “Super Hang On” in the score panel, even though it was clearly an Enduro Racer game. He also said the following:
“Yup, I worked on a version of Enduro Racer for Activision/Mediagenic: as I recall, it was intended as an enhanced disk-only version of the game for the US market (simply because at that time sales of the 1541 disk drive were low outside of the US). I can still remember the game’s version of the arcade music (though was that done by David Whittaker? I can’t remember). :-)
However, I’m reasonably sure that it got canned very close to completion and was never released. I certainly don’t recall getting any royalty statements. :-(“
Did Nick originally perhaps start doing the enhanced version of Enduro Racer after poor reviews before it was canned, and then resurrect the engine to potentially re-use for a new Super Hang On game? It seems unlikely, but with the odd “Super Hang On” mention at the top of the page – who knows if there is some bizarre twist about to surface.
Another strange entry into the GTW64 vaults, where Activision had planned to release a tape version of Gee Bee Air Rally. Magazines of the time even reviewed the game and mentioned a tape version in the price list. Of course, the disk version was released.
However, for reasons as yet unknown – it didn’t happen. Unless you owned the Big Box 30 collection from Beau Jolly. Infamously, the compilation included earlier builds of games, and the infamy continued with Gee Bee Air Rally, which is found to just be a frozen copy of the Disk version with one segment (which is why the game starts with the player in the mud field).
To be honest, I never really twigged that it was frozen back in the day – but it makes perfect sense now that Martin/Stadium64 has highlighted it.
So what happened – both Martin and I feel that its likely that they just had problems trying to convert it into a tape version (like they did with Pyramid of Time) and just ran out of time before deciding to can it (especially after the poor reviews).
When it came to adding to the compilation, they probably assumed it was available and had probably already done all the packaging, so just froze out a level in a panic to say that something of it was on the compilation. Bit sneaky, but nothing unusual it seems – just look at Further Adventures of Alice in Videoland.
So was anything started? Is there anything to preserve or just a case closed very early on?
Slightly different entry into the GTW64 vaults, with a missing scenery tapes entry for Test Drive 2. Thanks to Martin/Stadium64 – we learn that the manual for the original game (see downloads) talks about how to load the California Challenge add-on tape.
However, only the disk version has surfaced – so the tape version is currently at large. However, did it even exist? Perhaps it was cancelled as it wasn’t really workable?
It may well be the case for other scenery disks too, where tape versions were due. If you know anything more, please do get in touch.
A very short entry for another potential lost Capcom conversion in the shape of Street Football (not to be confused with the similarly named Epyx game). This was to be a conversion of the Bally Sente arcade game.
The game did see release on PC in 1988, but never saw release on any other platforms by the looks of it. Thanks to Michael Huth, we learn of its possible existence thanks to an advert in the US release of Bionic Commando (see gallery).
One thing to note is that Commodore 64 is mentioned, but there are no specific format listings against each of the games. So, its plausible that no conversion was on the cards – but for now, it is something that requires further investigation.
If you know anything more about the game – please do get in touch.
The collection of earlier versions of Activision/Electric Dreams games seems to be growing, and we have another here with Super Hang-On, which was flagged up on the Lemon64 forums by The Wolf.
Out in the wild are two versions of Super Hang On, both are pretty poor – due to how the developer Darrell Etherington had to pick up someone else’s abandoned work and finish it quickly. However, one of the versions features much larger bikes in the game.
Looking in more detail, the larger bike edition seems slightly unfinished. At the very start, there is no starting metal frame, but crucially there is only one single CPU bike that you see at any one time. The roads in the Africa edition are also red in the large bike version, but yellow in the smaller bike edition.
So what has happened? Well, in Games Machine magazine – they suggest that the C64 edition had been pulled from shelves due to quality issues. One theory is that this was the larger bike edition, and then Darrell made improvements, such as reducing sprites to get more CPU bikes and tweaked the colours etc.
JazzGhostrider feels it might be the other way around, and that large bike version is the improved version. We hope to learn more from Darrell soon to get confirmation.
Common version on the left, and large bike version on the right. Quite a few differences!
We weren’t entirely sure how the large bike version got out – if it was released as the disk version, or was an earlier release like with Chiller and its different music. One poster (Nayphee) on the Lemon64 forums suggests that in Australia, there was a budget re-release of the game where the large sprite version was on one side of the disk, and the smaller sprite version on the other. Thankfully, Martin/Stadium64 came to the rescue to confirm:
I have that Aussie budget release, and can confirm that both versions are included. Also tested all my originals of Super Hang-On and posted on Lemon, but give it here as well:
Electric Dreams – Side A – Map – Africa/Asia – BIG sprites
Electric Dreams – Side B – Map – America/Europe – BIG sprites
Ozisoft/HitSquad – Side A – Map – Africa/Asia – BIG sprites
Ozisoft/HitSquad – Side B – Map – America/Europe – small sprites
Game Set & Match 2 – Side A – Map – Africa/Asia – small sprites
Game Set & Match 2 – Side B – Map – America/Europe – small sprites
Reel Action – does only have Africa/Asia tracks – small sprites
Identical to Side A of Game Set & Match 2
Big Box 30 – Side A – Map – Africa/Asia – small sprites
Big Box 30 – Side B – No map – 2 onefiler America/Europe – small sprites
Electric Dreams vs Ozisoft/HitSquad: diskettes uses the same kind of copy protection.
Side A’s – seems identical
So that is how the big sprite version got out, but it is strange how the Disk version just has the large bike version when it could have been released on tape too. Are we seeing a Chiller-type scenario, where one or the other was then later released as a replacement? Does anyone have an original Disk version with the small sprites on just to really mix it up and confuse us more? :)
Even stranger is that the C64 version was never really reviewed at all by anyone at full price (or even budget it seems). If anyone can find a proper C64 full price or budget review, please let us know – it will be interesting to see which version they reviewed.
Our hunch is that the game was reworked into the smaller sprite version as some minor set of improvements, and perhaps would replace the disk version over time. But we’ll wait and hopefully hear from the horse’s mouth about what really happened very soon.
In the meantime, see the bizarre twist with a US version of the game being advertised as late as 1991. Something about Super Hang On and Commodore 64s do not seem to mix very well!
Our next entry is for a piece of software which is sadly missing, but was sold in very limited numbers back in the day in early 1990.
Quest for Truth was a graphic adventure game created by Jason Cupp, who made it in the same style as the Questron games. He had got it copyrighted under “Q/T Software” and advertised it for sale in Compute! Gazette in 1990 (sadly we can’t find the advert at the moment).
As it was towards the end of the C64’s life in the US, he only sold about 10 copies or so overall. Then in 1993, Jason decided to get rid of his entire set up, but also the only copy he had of his game.
Do you have this software in your collection at all and can you help us save Jason’s work? If so, please do get in touch – and please check your disk collections!
A short entry for a recent recovery from the archives of Paul Allen Newell, where researchers unearthed a lost storybook game that was being created by Centipede creator Dona Bailey and Paul for Activision.
More details can be read about the recovery here, though thanks to author Hugo Ruher, we have been given permission to add the full PDF of the article below. The article is currently in French, and if anyone is able to do a human translation to English, please do get in touch. The game asks you to choose between three different characters, Cathy, Beth and Kent and then goes through like an interactive book, asking you to carry out tasks and interact with other characters.
A recovery and analysis effort was made by Katie Biittner, Carl Therrien, and John Aycock along with Dona and Paul, where the source code was recovered and compiled to run on a virtual Commodore 64 software emulator (VICE 3.7).
The article talks about how the game was commissioned by Activision in the mid-1980s and aimed to create an interactive image and word entertainment software, which would now be recognized as an early entry into the visual novel genre.
This genre emphasizes social interactions and the exploration of branching narratives, marking initial steps toward hypertext and multiform games. Dona Bailey served as the designer, while Paul Newell handled the programming, working under a series of short-term contracts with Activision from May to December 1984.
Despite the innovative concept and the team’s efforts, “Computer Theater” remained unreleased. The article from ROMchip provides a comprehensive analysis of the prototype, drawing from interviews and a collection of physical and digital artefacts.
Unfortunately, there are no details about future plans for the prototype. However, we’ve spoken with Paul in the past, so once the article has been out for a while – we’ll hopefully learn more from Paul at some point to include on this page and possibly even add a download to check out. For now, here is a short video showing the title screen:
A very short placeholder entry for yet another missing 1987 Computer Novels title – The Scarlet Pimpernel.
Mentioned in Svenska Hemdator Nytt No.4/1987, it is suggested that the game would be released soon by the company on the Commodore 64 and 16-bit platforms. It was never to see release on any platform, and only The Three Musketeers would see release.
A feature appeared in Swedish magazine Datormagazin, issue 7 1987, page 4, with P Diab at publisher American Action which adds a few snippets, where they say:
“We are planning to release the Computer Novels series for all computers I just mentioned [previous passage: Atari 520 ST, Amiga, C64, C128, PC]. This also includes all other games. The Computer Novels series will also be published in special editions for the C128. It won’t be a direct conversion from the C64, more like a Deluxe version of the C64 game.”
Followed by:
“I’ve heard some loose rumours about “The Scarlet Pimpernel”. Is that something you intend to release?
Yes and no. We have it planned as the fourth [part] of the Computer Novels series, but we have not decided yet whether to publish it since we don’t yet know how people will react to the series. If all goes well and we come up with more action parts we will release it, the goal is for no games in the series to resemble each other.”
Was anything ever started, and can anything be found? As Anonymous Contributor suggests, this seems to imply that perhaps the game is at best on the drawing board, but no more.
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.
Games That Weren't® is the registered trademark of Frank Gasking.
