Unreleased & Cancelled Video Games across many platforms.
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. GTW has been preserving video game history since 1999.
Within only a week we have covered our hosting costs thanks to fantastic contributions from Brandon Cobb, Vinny Mainolfi and Jan Schulze. Thanks guys, your contributions were very humbling and helps keep things ticking over for us.
As a result we have taken the donation options off line until next year.
Thanks again!
Games That Weren’t team
Very occasionally in the pursuit of a GTW you stumble upon other, previously unknown GTWs by happenstance.
This happened to me recently as part of my ongoing investigation into the possibility of an Alien Trilogy port on the Sega 32X.
I was engaged in an email conversation with Keith Burkhill, who worked on Alien Trilogy for the Sega Saturn. Sadly he didnt know anything about a possible 32X port at the time but he did mention another game he worked on that was sadly cancelled.
It was a conversion of Psygnosis popular formula one racing game, F1, which was released for the PC and Playstation. At the time the Saturn had released F1 Challenge that sold poorly and provided only a very basic F1 experience. Psygnosis F1 on the other hand included the full 1995 season (despite being released in 1996) and was one of the top selling games of 1996, cementing the Playstations advantage over the failing Saturn.
The Saturn port was to be based on the existing Playstation version and according to Keith the game development had gotten so far as to get it running as a wire frame, which meant there were no textures. Sadly the game was then cancelled as by this time the Saturn market had died out.
Its addition to the Saturn game library would have been welcome indeed but perhaps the lag between the year in which F1 was based and the year it would have come out in on the Saturn contributed to a feeling that its time had passed, however its quite possible that the in-game stats would have been updated to showcase the current racing season.
Ive looked online for any reference to this planned conversion but cannot find any, hence the cheeky exclusive tag I slapped on the headline.
Hopefully something will turn up one day but in the meantime enjoy this video of the game playing on a Playstation and wonder at what might have been!
Two weeks ago, a posting was made to the World of Spectrum forum indicating that demo versions of the Amstrad CPC and Sinclair Spectrum versions of unreleased US Gold/Capcom game Mega Twins were being auctioned on eBay.
The Amstrad version was reviewed by Amstrad Computer User in one of it’s final issues so it is likely that this version came from someone involved in that magazine. The review in question featured a high resolution C64 shot! It was previewed in Amstrad Action, Sinclair User, Crash and Your Sinclair. ACU was nutorious for reviewing incomplete or unreleased games like The Amazing Spiderman, Rimrunner and Virgin Games’ version of Judge Dredd.
A few days after the auctions began, the games were removed – reasons citing damaged sectors on the discs made it impossible to sell them. They are now in the hands of skilled Spectrum/Amstrad perservation team members who will strive to recover what data they can.
Here’s hoping some playable code can be extracted.
Retro Fusion have just reported on a previously unreleased version of Dragons Lair on the Genesis/Megadrive surfacing. Check out the video below.
The game is set to be released very soon we are told.
Original source: Retro fusion
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.
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Thank you!
Dave Moore from Retro Software has recently informed us of a long lost BBC micro conversion of Cruise Attack by Mikro Gen being found safe and well.
This was sold to Dave Moore back in Sept 2010. The ZX Spectrum version has been around for some time, but no-one was aware of the BBC Micro edition. How did the game come about? Dave shed some light by giving us the story from the Ebay sellers site:
The story behind this tape is as follows: about 2 years ago I bought a batch of tapes from a seller on eBay that turned out to have a lot of cassettes with labels on them saying “Master”. All of them were Mikro-gen tapes and so I emailed the bloke back asking where he had obtained them; his reply was as follows:
“I used to work in a photo studio next door to a computer software development workshop in Bracknell, Berks. We did a lot of advertising for them, but they went bust during the last recession, and we were given some stock towards their outstanding account. I seem to remember the rest was skipped and crushed.”
That makes this a rather unique item – an in-house “master” tape that was (I’m guessing) used for duplication purposes when they had to run off another batch of games to sell. There is no inlay for this item. The tape is labelled on one side as “BBC Cruise Attack original MASTER 26.4.84”; there is no label on theother side. The spine of the case reads “BBC Cruise Attack”. It is interesting that this tape is labelled both “original” and “master”. None of the other MASTER tapes that I have use the word “original”.
So, here is the chance to own a BBC curiosity salvaged from the ashes of Mikro-Gen. As ever, I can’t tell if this tape will still load since I don’t have a BBC. All I can tell you is that the Spectrum masters that came in the same batch all worked perfectly.
Luckily everything did work perfectly, and the game is in the process of being made available. Dave has said that once the tape has been converted over to a disk image, hell pass a copy – which hopefully we can make available here.
In the climb in anticipation for the upcoming In Da 80s! event, Dave Moore (Of Stairway to Hell fame) and Peter Edwards have been very busy trying to encourage developers to come along and help create some new games!
Well, along with this – the guys will be unveilling a very impressive range of unreleased and incomplete BBC Micro games which have been salvaged from various old tapes and disks picked up in recent times.
Some of the highlights include (Thanks Dave for the notes):
More details on each of these can be found via the forum thread over at stardot.org.uk. Thanks to Dave Moore for the heads up!
What was first thought to be a lost and unreleased educational game on the Commodore 64, has been found safe and well thanks to the guys at the Personal Computer Museum.
Chutes and Ladders has been on our missing list for a while now, and has thankfully been backed up by the museum and provided to all for posterity.
Check out the entry and NTSC only download here:
Retrocollect have just recently reported that the long lost Codemasters game, Dreamworld Pogie, has been released at long last.
Basically Yolkfolk.com recently celebrated Dizzy’s 25th birthday by putting up a number of download treats, which also oddly included the source code to Dreamworld Pogie on the NES. After about 10 minutes, a fellow Dizzy fan had compiled it and got the thing fully working. Check out the YouTube clip of it all running!
Read more over at Retrocollect here:
http://www.retrocollect.com/News/unreleased-dreamworld-pogie-nintendo-nes-rom-surfaces-online.html
Grab the game from forum thread here (Follow links above for source):
Super Fighter Team (a classic game publisher based in San Diego, California) has recently brought out a new commercial release for the Sega Mega Drive called Star Odyssey, a role-playing game set in the future. This game, which was originally released in Japan under the title Blue Almanac, was later advertised in American video game magazines in the early ’90s under the title Star Odyssey. The ads promised a forthcoming release of the game in English — but this never happened… until now.
In 2007, Super Fighter Team acquired the only known copy of the English language prototype of Star Odyssey and in 2009, successfully negotiated a licensing contract with the current IP holder, Starfish-SD Inc. Thus on June 22, 2011, the 20th anniversary of the release of Blue Almanac in Japan, this anticipated RPG finally reached gamers not only in the USA, but around the entire world.
The release of Star Odyssey marks the first time a new game for a classic system has been produced and released in cooperation with a company in Japan.
Many thanks to Brandon Cobb (president of Super Fighter Team) for the news submission!
EDIT 05/12/21 – Removed links and images, as sales site now a gambling site. Thanks to Fabrizio Bartoloni for the heads up.
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