Preserving Cancelled & Unreleased Video Game History Since 1999
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.
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.
If you would like to help us to keep GTW and GTW64 running, then you are welcome to make a donation of any size by using the donation button on the side of every page (at the bottom, and out of the way), or via our Donation page.
Please note that donations only cover our hosting/domain costs, and that we remain a purely non-profit project. Each year we will try and raise £90 which covers our costs. Once we hit our target, no more donations will be accepted. More details can be found on our Donation page.
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 was in the process of being made available. Unfortunately, that was in 2011 and Dave got caught up with other things. Thankfully, in October 2024 – he’s now preserved the game and made it available for download. So here it is – a neat Missile Command clone.
We hope to learn more about it soon! With huge thanks to Dave Moore for recovering the game.
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.
As the backlog is starting to creep up a bit, here is something to relieve the backlog pressure!…
Its time to finally lay the rumor to bed. There wasn’t a Mega CD version of the classic game, Cannon Fodder.
The rumors have existed since the days of the Megadrive and have never really be confirmed or denied one way or another. Some people claim to have seen adverts for it and its always been hoped one day something would leak out into the internet to prove its existence.
Sadly, it is not to be.
In the pursuit of my investigations about this GTW I managed to contact Jon Hare of Sensible Software fame, who kindly replied saying he knew nothing about a planned Mega CD version of Cannon Fodder.
According to Games That Werent’s very own Frank Gasking, Jon was often involved in the conversions of a game by Sensible Software onto other platforms, either overseeing them or coding them himself.
Taking that into account then, it makes it highly unlikely that Cannon Fodder ever existed in some form for the Mega CD. Its still possible it was mooted at some point, perhaps even announced on an advertisement for the game on other platforms. It wouldn’t be the first time a game was advertised as coming soon before it had even been started.
But unless Jon’s memory has tricked him (or he wasn’t involved in early discussions) it looks like Cannon Fodder for the Mega-CD is a ghost that can finally be put to rest.
A big thanks to Retroid64 who has produced an excellent Top 10 YouTube video of most wanted GTW64 titles and findings in the archive. Check it out below! :-)
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.
