Documenting unreleased, cancelled and prototype video games.
Welcome to Games That Weren't!
We are an unreleased and cancelled 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 games that were never released to the public. Sharing history and stories from the developers, assets and more before it is too late.
Yet another PAL developments game has been fully recovered and released, and its another full game.
Thanks to sterling work by Dean Hickingbottom to recover the game from his C64 disks and recompile it after 26 years, we are proud to present this conversion of a Spectrum/Amstrad game that should have been released across all formats by PAL developments, but for reasons unknown, never got out the door. Enjoy!
A short GTW64 update to keep things moving and show some quick updates that have been going on.
After 30 years of being missing, a preview build of Nuclear Nick has been recovered by Peepo and the guys at Triad. Check it out!…
Something I was beginning to think I would never get to say!
Just over 18 years worth of searching for Games That Weren’t – we are very proud to to present the fully recovered “Daffy Duck – And The Great Paint Caper”. It’s been some journey for us, but the full game was recovered in PDS source form and carefully constructed over the past month or so. Full details can be read in the main entry about how the game was found, and of course how we ever got to this stage.
Finally, you can now play the game as Hi-tec intended – and it certainly lives up to its glowing review from Zzap 64. Seasoned gamers will have no problem getting through it, but it is an important piece of C64 history now digitally preserved for posterity and which could well have been lost forever. Enjoy! :)
Eagle-eyed visitors may have noticed our cryptic note on the end of our last GTW64 news update. Well, we have something a little special for you coming up on the site, and hopefully a bit of Christmas come early.
It’s almost ready, so keep your eyes and ears out on the site for the big news coming soon.
Time to go back to being all cryptic and all that!
;-)
Wow, has it really been since April when I did a GTW64 update? Well, the updates have been happening since then, but I haven’t done a digest of what has changed, so here it is below. But also, we have some surprises for you in the shape of 4 new releases! Details below!
Remains of Carleton Handley’s abandoned budget Armalyte clone has been recovered by GTW and re-constructed by Carleton for you to all enjoy…
Remains of what seems to be an abandoned Picross clone has been added…
An obscure preview title which was found on Jukka TapanimÁ¤ki’s online disk archive…
A 5 year search of a game that has been lost for over 30 years is now over, with the game’s developer recovering the title for GTW to put out there…
Another 16 new entries have also been added in the form of:
Black Hawk, Butch – Hard Guy, Coma, Coven, Double Dragon V1, Enforcer 2, M45, Maelstrom, New Zealand Story V1, Operation Gunship, Planet Quarx, Quark IX, Screaming Wings, The Black Onyx, Unknown adventure game, Wreckers
And many other updates, which notes can be seen in the update notes for each. Enjoy!
Airwolf V1, Arcadian, Arsenal FC, Body Slam, Bombzone, Captain Courageous, Charlie Chaplin, Coloris, Covert Action, Defensive, Dempsey & Makepeace, Dragon Slayer, Eye Of The Moon, Giana 2 – Arthur And Martha In Future World, Gotcha Maths, Gremlins, Guy Spy, Habitat, Hangman’s Hazard, Hydlide, Ice Age, International Karate Deluxe, International Karate V1, Jimmy’s Grandprix, Lone Wolf – Ice Halls Of Terror, Lord Of The Rings, Math Tutor, Murder!, Nighthunter, Parasol Stars, Primary Maths Tutor, Psionic, Pulsator, Sankara Stone, Scooby Doo V1, Shellshock, Shelter, Sketch And Paint, Sooty And Sweep 2, Star Maze, Swords And Sorcery, T-Runner, Tank Battle Simulator, The Abyss, Toddler Tutor, Trojan, Twister, Unknown Tony Crowther game, Vale Of Shadows, Who Dares Wins, Zamzara V1
Something is brewing at GTW64…. that is all….
Thanks to Ross Sillifant, Simon Butler sheds some light on a lost Arc Developments ST game:
Ross: So, Simon, what could you tell us about various ARC Development titles on ST/AMIGA you were a key part of?
Simon: Blimey I’d forgotten about the Arc titles. StarBreaker was one of Steve Cain’s babies. He designed it, such as it is and I merely created the graphics. I actually had to check out a YouTube video to remind myself of it.
I do remember spending ages on spaceship design for the main craft, although looking at it now makes me wonder why. It seems to have been a coding demo more than anything else with several layers of parallax sitting uncomfortably on top of a very lackluster side-scrolling shooter.
When you consider the shooters that had been created on the 8 bit machines then this is a very shoddy piece of work. But a lot of my titles from this era were less than stellar. I’m not talking graphically, there were one or two that I was particularly proud of from this period, 9 Lives being a case in point. But others left a lot to be desired.
The whole ARC thing was very hit and miss with ideas just being snapped up without allowing anyone to flesh them out. I actually left Ocean to work on these titles because a certain Mr Bracey had announced that at no point would Ocean be moving into 16 bit
development. Maybe I misheard him, maybe he meant “not right now”, but it wasn’t a decision I regretted. It did allow me to did my toe into the 16 bit waters a lot earlier than I would if I had stayed at Ocean.
Ross: What became of the ST Tube-Shooting game you and Jon Gibson
were working on?
Simon: The Tube Shooter? Hmm I only have the vaguest of recollections regarding this but I think we were going to attempt a kind of fake 3D. It might have been inspired by something I’d seen in the arcades or just one of my mad ramblings from that period, who
knows?
I used to throw out ideas on a daily basis, ideas cost nothing. I should imagine that the reason behind it never seeing the light of day was most probably due to the fact that Atari just dropped our development team like a hot brick after a while.
They were never the best of clients, unreliable if I remember rightly. Sorry I can’t shed any more light on things, but it was a very long time ago and not quite as memorable as the Ocean days.
Games That Weren’t is a freely ran project, 100% non-profitable and done in our own free time. To ensure minimum downtime, storing vast amounts of scans, downloads and information we unfortunately have to pay for hosting.
If you would like to help us to keep GTW and GTW64 running, then you are welcome to make a donation of any size by using the donation button on the side of every page (at the bottom, and out of the way), or via our Donation page.
Please note that donations only cover our hosting/domain costs, and that we remain a purely non-profit project. Each year we will try and raise money to cover our costs. Once we hit our target, no more donations will be accepted. More details can be found on our Donation page.
Thank you!
Another early version of a title which saw release on the C64, this time an earlier edition of Strike Fleet.
This originally was to be called Task Force 1990, but seemingly went under a bit of a cosmetic change and had some final tweaks before release. A big thanks to contributor Nemo for the heads up!
More of this earlier edition can be seen towards the end of this video:
Thanks to Obi-Wandi, we learn that there was potentially an earlier edition of Gauntlet on the C64, which featured “easily comprehensible speech synthesis”.
This was according to Happy Computer magazine and in their review of the Amstrad edition of the game.
Could any of those involved in the C64 conversion confirm this? Sadly Bob Armour does not answer any retro related enquiries, so its unlikely we will find out (he’s also most likely sitting on a copy of Murder! too). Would be interesting though to learn if the reviewers got things correct :)
Thanks to Ross Sillifant, it seems the best person to answer things will be a chap called Bill Allen. Is there an earlier edition waiting to be found??
So far it seems Tony Porter from a Conversion Capers article in Retro Gamer Magazine issue 23 (Thanks Ross!) has confirmed that the speech sounded terrible and took up too much space, so it was dropped. We can still check with Bill Allen if there is still a version somewhere with the speech included.
Here is a gallery of articles mentioning the speech, thanks to Ross for sourcing!
Triad recently released an early build of Moonfall, which was a vector game by the late Jukka TapanimÁ¤ki.
The game was developed in 1989, but heavy delays meant that Hewson/21st Century Entertainment didn’t get to release the game until 1991.
This earlier build has a different panel, less vectors (but runs faster as a result). It’s an interesting look at how the game was shaping up early on!
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