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.
UPDATE! – Case closed! Game confirmed as released and preserved by Marco (Exile) Das and Genesis Project. See downloads.
Early days, hence a very short entry. Contributor Jari Karjalainen has reported that in a DigitPress interview with Robert Jaeger (creator of Montezuma’s Revenge), he mentioned a game called Crossfire Canyon.
Originally this was made by his friend Dave Sullivan and he was to convert it to the C64.
Unfortunately neither version has been found, so does it exist? Can anyone help otherwise preserve it? It seems that the game could be preserved at the “Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection in the History of Microcomputing at the Online Archive of California”. We’ll see how this goes.
The game itself was a port of a title from the Vic-20, written by Dave Sullivan. It was simple and fun, where you would control a guy trapped on a platform on the bottom of a canyon. There were two volcanoes that showered a stream of rocks on the left and right sides. You could only run left and right and pick up rocks and debris that lands on the floor. Enemy creatures would emerge from caves on the left and right side – these would arrange in stacks and push rocks at the player.
At the time, Robert suggests it was criticized for being too simplistic and as a result was never released. It is possible that Robert has it still somewhere, but may not wish to release the game.
But recently in 2017, contributor Mark Sawtelle came forward with a sealed copy of the game, which was released by BCI software. We are not 100% certain if it is the exact same game, but hope to find out soon. It’s likely the game may be sold at auction in the future, so chances of seeing it preserved may still be slim. But it seems the game could well be out there!
Early days, hence a very short entry – but we have reports that there were indications of a sequel to Black Gold by reLine being released for the Amiga.
A short entry for a title which was written by Patricia Curtis, and was snapped up in the end by Microprose. Before that, Patricia was touting the game around to several publishers.
All we know so far was that the game was to be an isometric puzzler. Patricia tells us that you would bounce a ball around different one screen levels – where the object was to fill the ball up with the correct colour from puddles of colour that were also moving around the level. If the ball bounced on a drain, the ball broke – if not, then the tile would bounce down and spring back.
The black colour was the bad colour and emptied your ball. You also had a few power ups and other things like indestructible ball, teleports and more.
Sadly the game is completely lost due to Patricia not keeping any of her work disks, so it is very likely that this game is now sadly lost for good.
A short entry for a title which was reportedly for Mastertronic back in 1988, but for reasons currently unknown never quite made it.
The game was being developed by Reptilia Design, with code by Andy Syco (of Werewolves in London fame), graphics by Blancmange (?) and sound by Neil Baldwin. It seems the cracking crew – Fusion, got hold of a pre-release version of the game and leaked it. Is this the reason why the game didn’t get released?
When you load up the preview – there isn’t a huge amount to do. You control a large flying guy, who has a limited range of shooting, and must scroll along horizontally – attacked by a series of unimaginative attack waves. There are no backgrounds or anything else of note, which suggests that this game was at a very early stage.
Due for release in May 1985, Blue Sun was believed to have been a graphical adventure from Zinta Micro-Systems in 1985.
Sadly, although advertised in the US – it seems the game was never released. Quite possibly it was due to poor sales of Caveman (which is in Gamebase and released, albeit in limited numbers).
We know very little at this stage about the game and hope that something may come up in the future!
Due for release in Jan 1985, Telmar’s Gold was believed to have been a graphical adventure from Zinta Micro-Systems in 1985.
Sadly, although advertised in the US – it seems the game was never released. Quite possibly it was due to poor sales of Caveman (which is in Gamebase and released, albeit in limited numbers).
Anonymous Contributor spotted that the game could be a game taking place in the Narnia universe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telmarines – “Hailing from Telmar, the Telmarines are prominent in the book Prince Caspian”
We know very little at this stage about the game and hope that something may come up in the future!
Due for release in March 1985, Wendellwood Estates was believed to have been a graphical adventure from Zinta Micro-Systems in 1985.
Sadly, although advertised in the US – it seems the game was never released. Quite possibly it was due to poor sales of Caveman (which is in Gamebase and released, albeit in limited numbers).
We know very little at this stage about the game and hope that something may come up in the future!
We think that this title was to be called Carlo, or it could be the character of which the file depicts.
We found a large’ish sprite set labelled Carlo on the disks of Cory Kin, which seems to have a 2 sprite fighter character which is well animated. I did originally think it was a sprite set from something like Renegade on the C64, but it doesn’t quite match up. If anyone recognizes the sprites, please let me know.
Therefore, i’m not completely convinced yet if this was a legitimate new game that was being developed, as there was no sign of any code produced.
No doubt a working title, but Ah Type is pretty much as you would guess and is a clone of R-Type in very early stages. But even though it is early stages, what has been done so far is very clean and impressive.
We are treated to a very slick and fast interpretation of the game, which possibly shows a glimpse of how the official conversion could have been. It’s not got a lot to do, apart from fly your main ship over some of Level 1, and a brief attack wave – but its enough to show case the talents of Cory Kin.
The game was recently recovered from more disks which Cory shipped all the way from the US. It was developed during his Compunet days and was no doubt to send round companies to show what he was capable of.
There may have been more planned with the game, such as maybe a cheap budget title to copy off from the IREM arcade. We hope to hear more from Cory some day for his memories of the development and what his intentions were – its likely that it was just for self development purposes.
A short entry for a Badminton game which was being produced by Cory Kin during his early days of programming.
Nothing much was ever started apart from a small tech demo to show a scrolling playfield. The graphics are merely just test ones to start, but demonstrates an impressive scrolling routine. No company was contacted to release the game, and it was done just as a side project by Cory.
Unfortunately Cory lost interest in the development and went onto other titles instead. However, it seems the scrolling technique was made use of in other games such as Gem Quest and Indeflatable.
Check out a very small glimpse of a sport game which was never to be!
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