Preserving Cancelled & Unreleased Video Game History Since 1999
Welcome to Games That Weren't!
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.
Just a very short post to host some demo/hack disks that I found in Level Up games in Canterbury on some old C64 disks.
They seem to be credited to a Derick Boorman who lived in Kent and hacked around a bit with some old C64 demos, changing scrolltexts etc.
Please note, these were probably done when the author was very young – so the credit changes to themselves can be ignored. I did similar lame things when I was probably around their same age!
We managed to find Derick thanks to Gerard Sweeney, and they confirmed that it was them and their work. They didn’t recall much, but remember passing on their C64 to their nephew when moving over to the Amiga around 1990/1991. Derick also used to frequent in Computer World in Canterbury, and suggests we should bin any other disks we find ;-)
In case you want to see something a bit different, here are the disk images for posterity:
Thanks to Ross Sillifant for the heads up, this is a new and previously unseen Game Boy game that was due for release back in 1994 and was recently recovered and released by AIR Entertainment.
It is a pretty neat puzzle game that is around 99% complete, just missing some final polish. It’s unsure at present why the game never saw release, but check here for more details about the game and download below:
After 5 years of work (give or take), we’re pleased to announce The Games That Weren’t book coming soon in May 2020 from Bitmap Books, covering unreleased games since the dawn of the industry.
More details coming soon, but very excited to finally share the news after keeping quiet for so long.
A short entry for what was to be an educational based title created for the Sony PlayStation by Runecraft around 1999 time, based on the famous children’s series.
Thanks to lead artist David Tolley, we are able to show you a brief glimpse of some of the game assets (and quick photos of the design document) that David recovered recently from an old hard-drive. Continue reading →
Thanks to David Tolley and John Wells, here are some assets which were intended for use in the unreleased and incomplete Power Crystal for the 3DO M2 platform.
Within the gallery below are a number of assets showing game option screens, game icons, map tiles and sprite billboards. File: 4_ICONS1 in particular show trade items, with the rest being various different weapons, armour and power ups that may or may not have been implemented in the game.
John Wells later provided further assets, and even tools in June 2025. He had the following to say about the archive (which you can find below):
The code for editing and creating the maps (i.e., Zones) is included. The maps were created in DPaint using the “TEMPLATE.LBM” file—standard 640×480 resolution. DPaint brushes of grass, trees, and objects were used to fill in the blank spaces.
See example: \Perceptions\Trees.c\ZONE973.BMP folder.
Another great example is \Perceptions\Trees.c\973.C file. This is the file given to the programmers—Anders, Marcus, and myself—to check issues with borders not aligning. If an error was found, it would display a message telling me which Map/Zone was at fault.
Dave and I had to be very careful when creating the maps, as each of the four borders had to match adjoining maps—otherwise a height difference would be visible in the graphics engine.
If I remember correctly, each colour represented a height, so we had to be very careful not to create too much of a height difference when the player was walking or riding around. When creating objects (Buildings / Trees), a black pixel was used next to the object’s pixel colour to indicate direction—i.e., North, South, East, or West.
Another example gives a great look where dots/graphics represent each object: see folder \Perceptions\Village.c\TEXTURE.BMP.
Also have a look at Template\Perceptions\Brushes for Power Crystal\BUILDING.LBM. This helped Dave and me to place objects in the maps, and made it a bit easier instead of trying to remember coloured dots.
Dave Lago, Andy W., and Andy Noble had a hand in creating some of the code, but which part I couldn’t tell you.
Some of the files have interesting clues about what was in the game, so it’s worth having a look.
Due to the Sony PlayStation being released, it killed the 3DO off overnight. We had Panasonic down six months into the project to have a look at what we were up to. The next day, we got the bad news—it had been cancelled.
John also revealed the following roles overall on the game:
Directors
Dave Lago, Andy W and Andy Noble
Coders
Anders, Margus
Testers
Dave Lago, Andy W and Andy Noble
Map/Zones and utilities
John Carl Wells, Dave Fox
Artists
Tina Church, Derick, Jazz, David Tolley and Richard Church
Dave Moore (Aka Arcadian) has informed Games That Weren’t that the long lost BBC Micro version of Knight Orc has been found. In almost a one in a million discovery, the game was located at the Centre of Computer History within their archives – stuffed within an 8-bit Atari copy of the game.
A short post thanks to contributor Daniel Meléndez, who spotted Daley Thompson playing a slightly different looking Daley Thompson’s Decathlon game on the Commodore 64:
Not massive differences it has to be said, apart from the panel boards and the score display section. Here is the released version as a comparison (Screenshot taken from Lemon64)
Often early builds would change their panels/layouts slightly over time. Would be interesting to know if there were any other major differences between what Daley was playing above and what we got to see in the end.
Thanks to Allan Pinkerton, who has very kindly preserved missing copies of Basic Tools, Creators Revenge (Already out there as Metamorphosis III – The Creators Revenge), Math Pack and Math Flash.
They are not strictly ‘Games That Weren’t’, but we want to try and share any preservation work where possible for titles that had been missing – so here we go:
Although not an unreleased game as such, this is an obscure C64 based compilation that was released late in the C64’s life, which featured commercial games as PD games. It’s likely not many sold, and as a result hasn’t really been seen in the wild that often.
Thanks to the kind loan from Steve Green, here it is fully preserved with scans of the inlays + tapes:
Well, 2018 went far too quick! It’s been almost a year since our last update, which wasn’t really the intention and isn’t the norm. I had planned to take a few months break and then continue as usual, but unfortunately various personal challenges got in the way and also there has been the completion/continuation of a project I have been working on for almost 5 years. All will hopefully be revealed on that soon in 2019!
As a result, I have not taken in any donations for hosting costs this year, as I haven’t really offered you anything in return this year.
Overall, our yearly Christmas update this year is not quite the same as previous years. For a start, I have no new findings to offer for the first time in a long time because i’ve not been working on the project. I have been determined to do *something* though, so I have created a number of new entries and made some updates for you. I hope the wonderful influx of new C64 releases this year will have counteracted the lack of input from my side, and I hope to be fully functioning again next year. There is still plenty of work to be done!
Merry Christmas to all and all the best for 2019, as we kick off our update:
DISCLAIMER: We are a non-profit digitisation project, aiming to digitally preserve software and history which would otherwise be lost for good. If for any reason there is anything that you do not wish to be on the website, please contact us for removal.
Games That Weren't® is the registered trademark of Frank Gasking.
