Preserving Cancelled & Unreleased Video Game History Since 1999
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.
Getting into a bit of a pattern at the moment of doing posts on differences between early previews and final releases of games on a Friday. I’ll see if I can keep it up! Today we take a look at a preview of Ghouls ‘N’ Ghosts that was previewed in French magazine TILT, showcasing screenshots of the Atari ST edition in particular.
Also known as: Sub-Scan
Released on the Atari 2600, SEGA Electronic’s Sub-Scan was also due for release on the Commodore Vic-20 (and other platforms to be confirmed).
It was being developed by the same author (Joe Sengir) who worked on another unreleased Vic 20 SEGA game called Tac-Scan. Compared to that game though, Deep Scan was fully complete.
It isn’t known why the game was never actually released to the world, but its believed to be due to SEGA leaving the Vic 20 market and moving over to the C64. It was confirmed by the developer that they no longer had anything of the game, so it could well be lost forever.
Do you know anything more about this conversion?
Our next entry is for an arcade action adventure game set in the East, where you must guide Chinto through a castle full of traps and evil guards to avenge his parents’ death.
Spread across around 400 screens with a slanted top-down viewpoint, the game was to be a console-style martial arts game with Chinto avoiding traps, navigating mazes and engaging in combat galore with ninjas, guards and a large red dragon at one stage. The graphical style was very interesting overall, with characters that had small bodies and large heads.
Ixion is an intriguing arcade title that was due for release from SEGA back in 1983, and was based on Zaxxon’s hardware, even though you may not think it looking at the game. The game was a top-down 2D grid based action title, where you must collect all the letters to spell out the word IXION, whilst shooting enemies and avoiding being shot yourself.
According to Segaretro.org , it is suggested that Ixion likely failed its location test, considering that it was largely finished. Thankfully the game has been dumped and is actually fully playable in MAME.
Grzegorz Antosiewicz has kindly provided a number of titles and scans showcasing assets that never quite made the final build, so here is another post looking at one of those titles. Blastar was a neat multi-directional shooter which got mixed reviews from the press at the time.
Blork was a very stylish underwater shooter being created by the demo group Scienide (http://www.scienide.de/) around the mid-late 90s, where you control a cute fish main character and his octopus friend within a very dark and gloomy underwater world. Development was by Ply2, with music by Exodus and graphics by Blork and Nytech.
We are blessed to have a number of various preservation projects dedicated to unreleased/prototype games, especially with the vast number of platforms out there to try and preserve for. The Hidden Palace have for many years been preserving various prototypes and unreleased games across 16-bit (and onwards) platforms and this weekend they have announced one of their biggest endeavours yet.
Over 700 PlayStation 2 prototypes have been archived for you to check out, and there is much more to come too. Keep checking out for news and updates over at https://hiddenpalace.org/News/Project_Deluge:_PlayStation_2
Occasionally we take a break from covering games that were never released, but also look at titles that were released, but had some distinctive differences at one stage or another.
Today we’re covering Cardiaxx, which was released by Electronic Zoo in 1991 and then later by Team 17 in 1993. Thanks to Grzegorz Antosiewicz, here are some highlighted features shown in the press at the time that never made it to the final game:
In early previews from magazines such as K issue 54, Generation4 1991 September, Power Play 1991 12, TGM issue 12 – Grzegorz highlights that you can see unused bosses and power ups pods for your ship.
Whilst many had long abandoned the Amiga as a platform, there were those who were still trying to keep the dream alive, and one such team was the Italian based Darkage Software who were producing a number of games back in 2000.
As well as the impressive 3D title Tales of Heaven, they were also working on a game called Alive, which was a sort of a Super Stardust clone, but with many more objects on screen and moving a lot faster overall…. A sort of bullet-hell version it seems! It was featured briefly in the press of the time and looked pretty decent overall, as you can see from the screenshots in the gallery.
Brutal Speed was a racing game planned for the AGA Amiga, briefly previewed in Italian Games Machine magazine issue 65 under the name of Speed Mania. It was also known as Speed ManiaX and eventually evolved into Brutal Speed.
It was an impressive title that had 8 directional scroll at 1/4 pixels and 128 colours in total. It was similar in many ways to Super Cars 2, Overdrive and the likes of Neo Drift on the Neo Geo. Continue reading
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Games That Weren't® is the registered trademark of Frank Gasking.
