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.
Our next title was due to be released way back in 1984, but for reasons currently unknown – wasn’t!
The game was in development around the same time as Pet Person, which was brought by Activision and released as Little Computer People. However, it is thought that production was a demorolizing effort after working on Pet Person.
Based within a circus, you perform a variety of events to spell out words in a fun educational game. The game also comes with some jolly tunes and functional graphics.
Fully complete, just why was the game never released? We hope to maybe hear from Todd Marshall sometime soon to learn more about the production. For now, check out his interview.
It is thanks to Scott Stilphen who runs the Atari Compendium website, that the game has been preserved from artist Robin Ballweg’s disks and added to GTW64 in 2017.
We hope to learn more soon from those involved in the game, but for now – check it out for yourself!
Our next title was a surprise finding on the disks of Dean Hickingbottom, and was likely sent to Video Images for evaluation.
It is a very very early Operation Wolf clone with little interactivity at this stage, but looks like it could have been a fun budget title in the making.
We have no idea who was behind it, though it was found on a disk with the name ‘REM DEVELOPMENTS’. There was also the following note:
Missing levels 2,3+4 Collision Detection in but disabled as slight bug! Graphics, score, sound effects etc + light gun to go in. Memory is a shit!! Fucking Zeus!!
More information needed – if you know anything about this game, then please get in touch!
An intriguing title next up, which we are as of yet unsure if it was intended as an official conversion pitch attempt or was something unofficial to demonstrate the credentials of Video Images.
Two loading screen variants were created, but also a quick demo showing a road routine effect, with controllable car.
Dean tells us that the game was a Porsche demo dating back to 1988 at Video Images, where they were attempting to get someone interested in an idea they had for Outrun 2. Dean did the graphics and the coder was a guy called Dirk Lee.
The idea was to have the game set around all of Europe, taking in various famous landmarks. The potential customer (US Gold?) dismissed it all and wasn’t interested, but then some months later, Outrun Europa surfaced. Co-incidental? Perhaps, but Video Images didn’t think so at the time. Dean suggests they should have just done their own racing game.
What is interesting is that Matt Gray comments that his Motocross tune for Codemasters was originally intended for an Outrun 2 game that was never released. Could it be that he did the tunes for Video Images and for this game?
So was this the beginnings of Outrun Europe that Neil Coxhead once started and also was never released? Who knows, but yet another piece of history preserved.
Thanks to Martin/Stadium64 for the heads up – but on the back of MicroLeague Football’s manual, there were two more titles listed as being planned for release in 1991.
MicroLeague Basketball and MicroLeague Baseball – The Coach’s Challenge
Neither game would see release, though MicroLeague Baseball would surface with a slightly different name as “MicroLeague Baseball – The Manager’s Challenge” in 1991 for DOS.
It is plausible that code was started for both games on the C64, and probable that work was stopped when it was found the C64 market was drying up.
Could anything of the games be found? Were they also being developed by the same people who did MicroLeague WWF Wrestling?
Thanks to Max Mirini and a post on Reddit, we learn that final wwf expansion disks were advertised with matches were to include The Ultimate Warrior VS. Ravishing Rick Rude, and “The Hit Man” Bret Hart VS. Mr. Perfect, but only a broken version showed up of the first game when a fan sent off for the expansion disk.
According to the poster:
“The Warrior VS. Rude match ran much MUCH more slowly than the volumes before it, and the colors were all washed out. Weird browns, yellows, and reds. It was hard to look at it and difficult to play. It really needed a lot of fine-tuning, which I’m sure that the developers simply just ran out of money and time before they could do so.”
More research needed! But if you know anything more about the game or how some of these disks could be preserved, please get in touch!
Monster Maths was a title to be released on the Commodore 64 by a company called Shards in 1985, and was reviewed in Your Commodore Magazine issue 08, receiving a reasonable score overall.
It seems that either the company went bust before its release, or not many copies sold. The game did see release on the BBC Micro and Dragon 32, so what happened to the C64 edition?
Well, thanks to Codetapper, it has been confirmed the game was released and has provided a photo of the released game, along with another game they did called Fun To Learn.
In July 2019, Codetapper managed to get a tidied up version of Fun To Learn provided to GTW to add to the archives. It is hoped that Monster Maths will follow in the future. Now you can at least play one of the games from the series.
A short entry until we can confirm that there was indeed a C64 conversion.
Alien Garden was a computer generated art game, where you control an embryonic life-form that you must try and help survive and reproduce across 20 generations through trial and error.
A very early game that was released by Epyx on the Atari 400/800 in 1982, some sites suggest that a C64 edition was available or planned – but there is very little detail at present.
Has it therefore just been incorrectly attributed as a platform?
A short entry for a Super Pipeline clone that was written by a Zzap 64 reader called Rowan Crawford and sent into the magazine and a number of publisher at the time. Sadly it was never picked up.
The game had you drive a car around a track that you laid down, which had jumps and “Over the top” presentation (according to Rowan).
Unfortunately over the years the game has been lost and has yet to be found, although Rowan is trying to locate it via friends and contacts.
If you spot the game, please let us know and for now we’ll hope that it turns up some day.
Whilst having a quick sift through Nick Taylor’s Liverpool FC disks, I found some graphics which seem to be for a Cult Software football game – going by the billboard graphics.
Cult were mostly known for their Football management game, so maybe this was for an animation part of a managerial game?
Did it get very far and who was actually behind the coding?
Early days, but let us know if you recognise the artwork.
A very quick entry thanks to Peter Weighill for a game that was advertised by American Eagle in 1984 on the disk cover for Kukulcan on the Apple. Sherwood Forest was released on the Apple 2, but the Commodore 64 edition of the game seems to be completely at large.
The game was likely a graphic adventure game which was likely being converted from the Apple version. American Eagle were employing external Commodore 64 developers to convert a number of their games.
Thanks to Anonymous Contributor, we learn from Computer Games Vol 3 (see scans) that Zooom were behind the development and had the following to say about the game:
“As Robin Hood, you win the heart and hand of Maid Marion. But she won’t give you a second look until you’ve solved the eminently fair and logical puzzles that make this cartoony graphic adventure as much fun to figure out as it is to view. Spot animation and fast, fast disk access enhance the fun. (The C-64 version loads the next picture in three seconds!)
Zooom Software, for Apple and C-64”
Did anything ever manage to see the light of day? Much more info needed!
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