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.
Freebooter was a strategy title that was in production by Paul Clansey, just before he started working at Active Minds. It was actually submitted as a playable demo to EA at the time.
The game had you running programmable robot war on a mining asteroid. The player controls a freebooter, who has a squad of droids. After landing on an asteroid, he has about 10 minutes to hijack as much ore as possible before the megacorps fighter groups respond.
You could buy and construct different droids to help you complete your task, and the game would have come with different view points represented by 4 visual windows. More details from Paul can be found under “Creator Speaks”.
The game was only 30-40% complete and had no publisher in the end (where EA presumably turned down the project). It got cancelled when Paul went to work for Active Minds and went to work on the likes of Gazza 2.
In 2016, Paul was sorting out his notes and materials to help with a magazine interview, when he uncovered a disk of a demo sent to EA at the time. This was sent to GTW and fully preserved, and now with Paul’s permission we are able to present the final version of the game as it stood. Load the main file, and enter SYS2304 to start.
At the moment, we don’t fully understand what it is you have to do or what all the controls are, but Paul will hopefully shed some more light soon when he’s had chance to play through and work things out again. It does indeed look like a promising strategy game, and could have been a success considering Paul’s work on Alien.
More soon, but enjoy a piece of history preserved…
Mythos was a title that was in production by Paul Clansey whilst at Imagine Software. The game was caught up in the crash of the company and was lost on the Sage system hard-drive when it was taken away by the bailiffs. It was only 10% complete.
It was done mostly off of Paul’s own back, as Imagine were clearly in trouble at the time and Paul was doing the game to keep productive.
The game would have been a horizontal and vertically scrolling platform adventure game, where the platforms were floating fragments of rock. The main character was a swordsman, who could get onto a winged horse to fly between fragments.
Each fragment would be based on a different mythos, such as ancient Egypt, Greek or the world of Conan the Barbarian. Only the player character animation survived, and can be found in Time Trax (also by Paul)
See creator speaks for more details about the game from Paul.
A short entry for a title that was briefly listed as coming soon on the back of another released game.
Karate was one of a series of games from KAB Software, which seems to stand for Kevin A Burk software. Kevin developed all of the games with his own company, and Karate was to follow a 3D Boxing game, along with a Wrestling game.
The Wrestling game did actually see a release – so we are unsure as to why the Karate game never made it. Was it even started, and is there actually a full copy out there to be found?
After the successful Alien game developed for Argus Press, it seemed inevitable that the same company could have developed the sequel.
Sure enough, developer of the original game, Paul Clansey confirmed that he had started an outline design of Aliens for Argus Press, as they already had a relationship with 20th Century Fox via the original game.
Paul was provided with an early draft of the script (typewritten by James Cameron himself, with his own humorous commentary included – according to Paul).
Sadly, Paul’s version was never to get started in terms of code – as Electric Dreams/Activision snuck in and got the licence from under Argus Press’ noses.
So there is nothing to find of this movie licence, but maybe some day something of Paul’s original design proposal could surface. Stranger things have happened!
A very short entry for what could just be a mistake in the press.
Astaroth: Angel of Death was an average game released on the Amiga/ST in 1989 by Hewson software, which was a scrolling platformer game.
Greek magazine “Pixel” (a reliable and famous 8/16-bit magazine of the time) had a review of the Amiga version, which stated that a C64, CPC and ZX version was being released too. However, the adverts at the time for the game in magazines, have no indication of an 8-bit version – so did Pixel get it wrong accidentally?
Well, Games Machine and Crash magazine also had news that the game was due for release in November 1988 – so it seems there was very likely 8-bit versions planned at least.
The game also had a different name at some point too – as you can see in the alternative name.
More info needed – but a quick entry added for now.
Pet Person was the original incarnation of Little Computer People, before it was brought by Activision as a concept, and re-designed/developed by David Crane into the game we all know and love.
The original concept was fairly similar to the final game, but Activision would add the likes of a card game and make changes to sound and music throughout. According to Todd Marshall, a lot was changed overall from the original game.
The original concept was about a year in the making, suggesting that it was probably created and sold in 1984 to Activision.
It is possible that something of the original concept still exists, so its hoped that for posterity it could be found some day. For more details, check out this interview with Todd Marshall.
Thanks to Brendan Phoenix for the heads up. Zzap 64 in October 1986 had a small news snippet about Scarabaeus 2 coming soon from Ariolasoft.
Apparently the Zzap team had seen something of the game and thought it was very good. Coded by the same Andromeda team as the original game. So certainly, this sounds a lot more than just basic vapourware and there could well be something out there of a sequel to save.
Interestingly in 2017, contributor Hank got in touch with GTW64 to inform us that a strange video reporting to show the sequel had popped up on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/110227340 . The person behind the video (Thomas Sunhede) informed us that it was picked up as part of a bundle of Greve Graphics games, which were mostly master disks of the released games (see gallery).
In September 2021, Genesis Project arranged a preservation effort on all of the disks kindly loaned by Thomas, and now the demo can be checked out for yourself thanks to the efforts of Hedning and Zyron, who had to piece the game together into a more cohesive package.
There are 3 segments in total, an introduction sequence quite similar to the first game, where now you come out and take off in your ship. The next segment is a strange multi-scrolling area where you can click and interact with panels to change the direction of the scrolling. Not entirely sure what the purpose would have been at this stage.
The final part (press Run Stop to see this), has a very neat early 3D section with the screen split. For 1986, it looks particularly impressive at this early stage. Perhaps the split screen indicates that a two player mode was to be present?
As for how Greve Graphics came to have the demo, we are not sure just yet. We believe that a demo was sent by Andromedia, either to draw up interest in the game or to perhaps get another team like Greve Graphics to take it on. More mystery solving to come, but for now – check out this cool early preview for yourself!
As you may have guessed, Space Invadaz was to be a Space Invader clone, but modernized with a fresh new look.
It isn’t known what the game was intended for and for whom, but the development disks recovered by Triad in 2016 suggest that the game may have been developed for a magazine coverdisk.
So no credits at the moment, but we hope to find out soon and learn more about the game and what the intentions were. In its current state, its quite playable and features some lovely graphics.
Blaster Twins is a very early Bomberman clone which was being developed for Threshold Productions in the 90’s.
There isn’t a huge amount that can be done, apart from blow up some bricks and move both players around. The Green player is controlled via cursor keys, and cannot place bombs – but pressing return after moving will shoot fire in that direction. Pressing Space will also trigger three different movement speeds for the green player. Everything setup seems to just be for testing purposes at this stage.
Although making promising progress, the game was cancelled for reasons unknown – and was released to the world for the first time in July 2016 by Triad.
We hope to learn more soon about the game, so watch this space!
Andreas Mettler was a fairly prolific developer in Germany in the mid 80’s, doing a large number of PD games, as well as a few commercial ones too.
With the amount of games produced, you’d understand how it might be possible to forget about one of them – even to release it maybe?
That is exactly what happened with Bongo King, a graphic text adventure, written in 1986 by Andreas. At the time, Andreas was into Disney comics, and wanted to do a game based on Scrooge McDuck – to avoid any copyright issues, the characters were not drawn to likeness, and references were not included.
The game was to be Andreas’ last adventure game, and got forgotten about when moving onto other projects. It is now in 2016, that Andreas worked with Volker Rust and Stephan Lesch to save the game and make it available via http://www.c64-spiele.net/t_bongoking.aspx
Unfortunately due to my poor lack of multi-lingual skills, I am unable to play the game myself – with the game being completely in German. It looks great though, and many people i’m sure will enjoy the game!
Here is a play through which shows all the screens as well:
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