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.
A short entry which is thanks to gaming Kate Willaert of a Concentration game that was being created by Jimmy Snyder during the early Commodore 64 launch days.
According to Jimmy, Jack Tramiel liked the game, but told him to add sound to it. It is likely that this is the same game that Michael Tomczyk recommended for a game to come with the Commodore MAX computer (see scans).
Kate asked Jimmy if he had kept any of his old work, and sadly he confirmed he hadn’t. However, Kate wonders if perhaps the game may have leaked out in another form like with Greenhouse. There was a possibility it was a title called Matchmaker, but we found that this was another title by someone else.
Hopefully something of it will be found in the future. In the meantime, if you know anything more about the development – please do get in touch.
Yet another long lost Codemasters game, but one which is in fact been under our noses all along! Magnum Force was yet another title from the great Gavin Raeburn and is a sort of sooped up Scramble clone with end of level baddies and power ups. It’s quite a fun little budget title, and with the bonus of some previously unheard tunes by Gavin with digitized sounds.
It was never properly released as a stand-alone Codemasters title, but it was just recently discovered lurking on the Codemasters 30 games CD pack that was released back in the day. We assume that not many people actually purchased the package, and as a result – the game has remained on CD, unpreserved.
Richard Bayliss flagged up on the Lemon64 forums that someone had reviewed the CD pack which revealed the game that no-one recognized. Thanks to a dump of the CD on archive.org by Encore64, Tom-Cat/Nostalgia managed to extract the game from CD and convert it to a PRG. This was then tested/bug fixed and tidied up by Fungus/Nostalgia for a special new release in February 2025.
Tom-Cat has kindly passed on the original ripped file, which is included in the download. Under the articles section below, we have included their input about how the game was ripped.
The question is – why wasn’t this released individually, and why on the 30 pack? Our thought is that one of the games on the Spectrum/Amstrad that was due for release on the C64 fell through, and Codemasters were left short of titles – so included Gavin’s game which they had previously dropped.
Thanks to Colin Bell for flagging up – Magnum Force is mentioned in the track listing, but for some reason does not have any specific game instructions like with the other titles included. A bit of a mystery we hope to solve someday!
Our next entry into the archives is one that I’m sure used to be here, but we removed for some reason. This was intended originally as a game for Ocean, but was never published and instead was picked up by Cascade and released as Zone Trooper.
This seems to be an earlier prototype with different panels and a loading screen that was never used. There might be a number of other differences compared to the released game. Thanks to contributor Dan (see comments), it’s been highlighted that if you press the space bar, you go back to maximum stats. So a testing mode left in?
Thankfully the earlier prototype snuck out many years ago via the cracking scene – so the question is why did Ocean decide not to publish the game? Hopefully we may someday get to learn more from developer George Wright.
A short entry for an unofficial sequel to an Italian platform title that was released by Idea software back in 1991. Moonshadow 2 was being created by Darkerror, started in 2018.
A few previews were made, which looked essentially like just modified/updated versions of the original game without much having been changed. However, we’re informed that the code was written from scratch and was just using the graphics and sound from the original game.
We hope to learn more, but in the meantime – check out the previews below and the site linked above for more details. Thanks to Fabrizio Bartoloni for highlighting.
A short entry for a title that was highlighted by Baracuda, and found in a set of pictures. All that currently exists is a single loading screen with some credits on.
We’re not sure at this stage what the game was going to be like or if anything was ever started. Did it exist or was it merely vapourware?
For now, we have some credits and hope to learn more soon in the future.
Thanks to Nic / Xidex, we learn that within a sequence file on the disk version of Stellar 7, there was a message from the coder which said that there were tentative plans to write a sequel to the game called “Nova 9: The Revenge of Raf Torin”.
Sadly it was never to appear, but we did get to see Arctic Fox, which Damon Slye worked on. Was this perhaps what his sequel turned into?
However, years later there was a game called “Nova 9: The Return Of Gir Draxon” on the Amiga and PC, a very similar 3D shooter. Within the notes of Stellar 7, Gir Draxon is mentioned in the storyline – so it is clear that the game is related.
So, the question is whether anything was ever started on the Commodore 64 game, or was it merely just an idea that was never implemented?
Yet another lost title which has been found thanks to Csaba Virag and Norbert Temesvari (Oberon / Faces). This is a long lost Battleships game that seems to be nearly finished, but with a few bugs.
It seems to be fully working though, with menu, music and all the usual polish. We’re not sure at this point in time why it never got properly released.
However, here it is, so you can checkout for yourself!
UPDATE: It has been confirmed by Michael Hart that this game was released as Narnia in 1984 and can be found in Gamebase64. Case closed!
A short entry for a title which we know little about, but was flagged up by Zdrmonster, where a video on K-Byte shows an unknown game running. This was posted about thanks to GDRI.
It seems to depict a yellow character that is running around a top down/2.5D viewpoint, possibly collecting green circles and avoiding Mr Do style enemies and a wizard character on the left side.
A very short entry for an expansion pack that is currently missing for Skyfox 2, which would add a 10 additional missions. This could be ordered from Dynamix back in the 1980s and was flagged up by Martin/Stadium64 on the Lemon64 forums.
Unfortunately no one has come forward yet with owning a copy – so was it ever actually released?
If you know anything more about it, please do get in touch! :)
A short entry for another seemingly lost Commodore 64 title called Hårsfjärden. The game seems to involve you using a helicopter to repel submarines by dropping depth charges nearby, but without hitting. Hårsfjärden is a fjard south of Stockholm in Sweden where a submarine hunt took place in the early 1980s.
The game was developed by two brothers, Pierre and Robert Sandboge and the two were interviewed in issue 1 of Min Hemdator in 1983 (see scans). A small article was done in 2014 which is worth a read too.
In 1983, Pierre gets in touch with Swedish publisher Handic to ask whether they’d like to publish his games for the VIC 20. Quote from the book:
“The relationship with Handic leads to Pierre and his brother Robert being asked to make a game for the Commodore 64 when it is launched in 1983 [in Sweden]. Since submarine incidents are a hot topic at the time they want the game to be named Hårsfjärden, after the waters where submarine hunts have taken place during October 1982.
A C64 cartridge may contain either 8 or 16 kb and they start developing the game with the maximum amount of memory in mind. Hårsfjärden is demonstrated at the Nordiska Mikrodatormässan (Nordic Microcomputer Expo) in 1983 and is by then almost completely finished.
But Handic gets cheap for some reason and wants the game to fit into the cheaper 8 Kb cart. The brothers try to compress the code, but are not successful enough and the game is sadly cancelled in the end. Despite this, it can still be found in some price lists.”
It looks like the game was close to being finished – so can it be preserved? Hopefully with the names known – we’ll see this game in the future.
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