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 since 1999.

Please Browse our archive and discover the many entries that we host for many different platforms.

Latest News and Posts

GTW64 and C64.com update

Posted: by Frank Gasking

Over the past few months, GTW64 has been working with C64.com to preserve a series of games after working on the disk collection of Darren Melbourne. 25 or so disks were painstakingly preserved by C64.com, and GTW64 trawled through these and found many a lost game. We present a good selection of these, but more will follow in the future with more disks being examined and preserved by both of us.

The collaborated update includes:

  • Nuker preview found and released
  • Runestone preview found and released
  • Duel full game found and released
  • Unnamed CRL game preview found and released
  • Leopard Lord full game found

Then part of GTW64’s usual update includes:

  • Necronom graphical assets found
  • Shao Lin’s Road V1 assets found
  • Enduro Racer V1/V2 preview found
  • Early version of Microprose Soccer released
  • More details on Razzmatazz added
  • 42 other new entries added
  • 17 existing entries updated

Nuker image

Enjoy, and hope you all have a good holidays and a happy new year! We’ll be back in 2012 with more joint findings :)

http://www.gtw64.co.uk and http://www.c64.com

Posted in: Commodore 64, News | Tagged: | Leave a comment

DestructANT released

Posted: by Frank Gasking

Some of you will recall the awesome Spellcast game on the Commodore 64 that never was – the game by the excellent Genesis Software, which featured brilliant artwork by Jonathan Temples.

Well, after a break of around 20 years, Jonathan has got back into game art by designing for a new iPad game called DestructANT (Which ironically features Ants, just like Nobby The Aardvark). It’s great to see Jon’s brilliant work once more on a medium on which Jon produced many a great game on which I enjoyed as a 9/10yr old back then.

Destructant screenshot

If you want to check out Jonathan’s work, check out the App store as the game is now released or the website at www.infuriousrepublic.com

Posted in: News | 1 Comment

Konix Multisystem game found!

Posted: , last updated: by Frank Gasking

Mark Campbell, webmaster of the Konix Multisystem archive, has informed Games That Weren’t that at long last a game has been recovered for the Konix Multisystem. It has been many long years of trying to find remains of development from the system, so this is a huge breakthrough!

The game is a long lost conversion of Robocod, ported from the Amiga – of which you can see a picture of some of the assets below. Developer Neil Beresford recently came forward after a request was made to try and get some source code to build a working Konix Multisystem emulator.

But what are these black box photos further down you ask? … Well, something else worth mentioning I guess ( ;) ) is the fact that another developer has found their Konix development system (The first which has been found so far). We are unsure at present if it works, and at the moment it is hoped that far more info will be found out about the machine as a whole and more of its internals. It hopefully will aid development of the emulator.

Excellent news so far, and it is hoped that we may see Robocod on the Konix Multisystem running by Christmas time – which is fitting considering the theme of the game. We also hope to add a few more assets here over time, so watch this space!

Posted in: Konix MultiSystem, News | 1 Comment

GTW64 updated

Posted: by Frank Gasking

A new update from Games That Weren’t, including:

20 new entries added

Civilization, Dive Bomber, Dinnamic Donkey Duo, Erik the Destroyer, Elusive, Giana Strikes Back, Game#3, Gyrofalcon, Imperial Bodyguard, Pimple Panic, Robin Hood, Shian: “Tiger Style”, Shian: “Wu Dang”, Samba 2, SAW Wars, Unnamed game 1, Unnamed Football game, Unnamed game 2, Unnamed game 3, Zach Townsend Puzzler

8 game entries updated

Car Wars, Messiah 3, Quonodam, Shockwave, Trojahn, Thundercats V1, The Legend of Kyril

http://www.gtw64.co.uk

Posted in: Commodore 64, News | Leave a comment

Seal Cull beta testing

Posted: by Frank Gasking

Recently in 2011 saw the re-launch of the Bad Taste label by Keith Wood in preparation for a upcoming article in Retro Gamer magazine on Dis Baby.

Coming from events of producing the article and interest from the Bad Taste range of games, Keith has decided that the first game from the Bad Taste label will be a proper version of Seal Cull (Released on the PC platform). Seal Cull was a game that never was for the C64 back in the 80s. It was believed that it was a Bad Taste game, but Keith confirmed that this wasnt the case. However, Keith loved the idea so much that he has decided to create the game. Keith has been busily working away with his family members to get the game complete and ready hopefully by November.

Keith is now wanting to open the game up for Beta testing, and needs help. For more details on getting involved, please go to:

http://www.badtastesoftware.co.uk/beta.html

Posted in: Commodore 64, News, PC | Leave a comment

Mega Twins CPC/Spectrum Prototype Update

Posted: by Frank Gasking

I’ve just seen this message from Gilby on World of Spectrum regarding the recently discovered discs:

To date, the Spectrum Mega Twins disc has been successfully dumped, plus two Amstrad discs with Mega Twins on it… There are other proto discs that have been recovered, but progress is very very slow. Mega Twins is in a fairly playable form, although not complete. There are some graphics glitches with the scrolling and some placeholder graphics are in place rather than finished artwork… Also it appears some collision detection is not in place.. I´d say the game is about 95% complete give or take.

This seems to tally with the CPC screenshots on from Amstrad Computer User featured. 95% sounds promising, lets hope we get to have a go soon.

Posted in: News, ZX Spectrum | Leave a comment

Thank you!

Posted: by Frank Gasking

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

Posted in: News | Leave a comment

EXCLUSIVE: Psygnosis F1 was a GTW port for the SEGA Saturn

Posted: , last updated: by Alex Ross-Shaw

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!

F1 by Psygnosis on the Playstation

Posted in: News, Saturn | Tagged: , | 4 Comments

Mega Twins Demo Discovered?

Posted: by Frank Gasking

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.

Mega Twins on the Spectrum (Thanks to WoS)

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.

Posted in: News, ZX Spectrum | Leave a comment