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.
A quick entry for a title that was spotted in a catalogue for Ringside/EAS Software/Procovision by Martin/Stadium64. This was a puzzler style game which was a bit similar to Pengo. http://www.mobygames.com/game/roll-out
Versions were released for the Amiga and ST, but the C64 version is very much at large. Was it ever released or even started though?
More information needed!
A quick entry for a title that was spotted by Martin/Stadium64. This is a football quiz game based on the Merseyside blues football club.
www.mobygames.com/game/official-everton-fc-intelligensia
Versions were released for the Amiga and ST, but the C64 version is very much at large. Was it ever released or even started though?
More information needed!
A quick entry for a title that was spotted by Martin/Stadium64. Although there is a “European SuperLeague – Football Fortunes 2.” by CDS, “European Superleague” was confusingly a completely different title with a similar name.
An interview can be found here with the author of Football Fortunes 2: https://medium.com/football-fortunes-2017/q-a-with-keith-mcleman-the-creator-of-football-fortunes-2-european-super-league-69348d67ca7c
Versions were released for the Spectrum, but the C64 version is very much at large, even though mentioned in the manual. Was it ever released or even started though?
According to Fabrizio Bartoloni – in issue #38 of “Super Commodore 64/128” (page 40-41) reviews CDS’ European Superleague referring to it as a C64 game in the body of the review while accompanying it with Amiga screenshots. Does that mean they had an actual C64 copy of the game?
This rather oddly named title was to be released in the US by a company called EnTech, and was believed to be an arcade action game where you must go underground and defeat the ‘Babies of the Dirt’, and also watch out for ‘Mother’, who I assume was some kind of enemy that would hunt you down in the game. The game was advertised in a few early magazines of the time.
Nothing much else is known about the title at all, though the following web page did some research over 10 years ago and had confirmation from a Matthew Stern (Entech’s PR rep at the time) that the game was never released.
http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/398/babies-of-the-dirt-entechs-dirty-secret
However, the music oddly surfaced in the “Studio 64” package that Entech did release, which you can find a download of here. Its possible that the person who developed Studio 64, may have done Babies of the Dirt perhaps?
Well, it was confirmed via a video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSq1350WusA&t=1284s by Matthew that the game was to be developed by Ray Soular, but it was never finished. Matthew also never saw anything of the game either. It could be that only the music has survived afterall.
More information needed – is there a concept demo out there, but also why was it cancelled and how did it actually play?
Thanks to Marco Das, Lawrence Fletcher and Benji Edwards for the scans also added to this page from the above source. Also Max Mirni for flagging up the video interview with Matthew Stern.
A quick entry for a title that has recently been recovered and released over at http://www.pagetable.com/?p=940 .
This is a title that was written back in 1986 by Peter Hempel and written in German. It has been translated in 2018 into English by Lisa Brodner and Michael Steil.
We know little about where the game has come from, but here it is – and hopefully we’ll learn more soon, including if there was commercial release intention for the game.
Enjoy!
A very short entry to put down a marker for hopefully finding some missing 32K entry games for the Mekka & Symposium 2000 demo party and their 32k game competition.
A number of games were listed and we believe are C64 based titles, though are currently missing. These are:
Can you help us find and preserve them?
A very quick entry, where contributor ‘Nicolas’ can recall seeing a C64 conversion of this early Cobrasoft game, which did see release on the Amstrad CPC: https://cpcrulez.fr/GamesTest/meurtre_a_grande_vitesse.htm
Nothing of the C64 edition can be found online, and with Nicolas being a close friend of a coder in the Babygang group – its possible that a pre-release version of the game was perhaps obtained back in the late 80’s and Nicolas saw that.
Looking on Gamebase, there is a similarly titled game which may be by the very same author of this title called Murder on the Atlantic – its likely part of the same series, as this too was by Cobrasoft: http://www.gb64.com/game.php?id=14700&d=18
Cobrasoft was founded by Bertrand Brocard, and the French wikipedia page (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobrasoft) on the house does list the game for the C64.
Interestingly in 2013, there was a crack intro release for the game, but no actual game. So what happened? … http://csdb.dk/release/?id=117273
Thanks to Sam64H and Olivier Cappelaere, the game has been found and fully preserved. The game was indeed released and just had a very limited release overall.
Case closed!
Our next GTW title can only be described as stunning. Though it is with sadness that we are placing it into the archives on the request of the author Johan Forslöf.
We have spoken to Johan over the past few years about the title, and each time we’ve encouraged him to continue and try to pick up the drive to finish the extemely promising title. We have resisted adding the title to the archive given that there was still a chance it could be finished. The game was started around 7-8 years ago and has been come back to on numerous occasions.
This year was different, and Johan has told us to just go ahead and put the final preview into the archives. The game shows a very ‘Braid’ looking main character, who with his hi-res overlay, looks amazing and animates very well. The backgrounds I thought were done with extended background mode, but they are actually standard multi-colour hi-res (though Johan planned to do ECM at a later stage). They are wonderfully atmospheric, with a few enemies that you can shoot.
There is not a huge amount to do just yet, apart from explore the multi-directional scrolling areas of the castle environment at this stage, but it is a great indication of what a fantastic game this really could be. The problem is that Johan has kept losing motivation with the game, and has never been fully sure what the full direction of the game should be.
The good news is that Johan is still open for the game to be continued, but needs someone to help give motivation and ideas to further progress the game. So rather than a graveyard entry, we want this potentially to be an advert for something that could be more. Possibly code and artistic assistance to take the game forward. If anyone is interested, please contact me and I can forward your details to Johan.
It would be a shame to see this one die. Can it be saved?
A short entry for a title that we need to find out more about from Mike (Kernal) Berry.
This was likely to be a sideways scrolling shooter that Mike Berry was producing for a budget label or similar back around 1989-1990 time which never saw the light of day. Some test graphics of a lunarscape were produced by Roy Fielding and sent to Mike for checking out.
This test demo was sent to Clockwize back in 1990 when Roy tried to get work with the development company, and the disk was recovered and sent to GTW from Dean Hickingbottom in 2017. As well as this demo, you can also download the original submission disk that Roy sent.
We asked Mike about the game, and it had taken him completely by surprise and is a brief title that has been long forgotten. The game had no specific title, but was to be a cross between Defender and Lunar Jetman. The first couple of levels were to however play more like Moon Patrol, which Roy’s graphics were likely to be used within.
Mike cannot recall anything else at present, though will be in touch if he finds anything or has more recollections. He believes that the game didn’t get much past the scrolling and ship control stage.
Our next entry into the GTW archives comes thanks to Francesco Milioni, which was due for release on a tape compilation to be released in Italy, but was too late due to the declining C64 market.
Traffico is a revisited version of an original basic frogger-like game that was published in Italy by Gruppo Editoriale Jackson. Francesco took the game, added music, a nice intro, modified sprites and graphics. He also compiled the game with AustroComp, so that it became a lot faster and smoother to play. The original in BASIC was far too slow.
We’ve added the original game (on TAP image) as a comparison.
It’s a game that may not hold your attention for too long, but it is yet another title now preserved.
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