Games That Weren't^®

A very simple side way scrolling shooter which was apparently being done for Markt and Technik back in 1992.

Your fighter is fixed to the bottom of the screen and has no real interaction at this stage, but there are 3 levels still in the preview with different themes and music overall.

What happened to this game, and was there anything more playable than this? It is likely that the game was pitched to the company but it was rejected. We need to find out more!

Our next title is a simple minesweeper style game which was being done in the mid-late 90’s for an unknown source.

It’s a nice enough implementation, but nothing too special which hasn’t been seen before.

The likelihood is that the coder got bored and went onto pastures new, but with a coder name known, we hope to try and get to the bottom of what happeneed to this game. Do you know anything more about it?

An interesting start of what seems to be an interpretation of Duck Hunt on the C64.

It’s not badly done, though the target is a little slow and lethargic. But it looks promising overall, and would have maybe made a nice game with a light gun option.

We’re not sure of the intentions for the game, but guess it was just done for a bit of fun. Hopefully the coder will shed some more light soon.

This is a pretty neat looking game, where you control a prisoner who is trying to break out of prison. Here you must run along in a similar style to Rapid Fire and try and kill the guards who are trying to stop you.

In this preview, you cannot shoot anything and just get to the end of the map and let the time run out. It’s fairly simple, and we guess the coder just ran out of steam and canned the game as a result.

Did it progress with any more levels or was this it?

Thanks to Gaz Spence, we learn roughly of the credits thanks to an entry in CSDB. We’re not sure of the real names, but hope to find out soon to see if this preview ever got any further. If you know anything more, then please do get in touch.

Watch this space!

Yet another puzzler to add to the archives, this time something a little different where you must replicate the pattern on the right most box.

It’s pretty simple stuff, with some snazzy presentation at the bottom – it isn’t anything too special, but it would be good to find out what happened to the game and if it got any further than this.

We guess it didn’t, but lets find the coders and find out for sure.

Move Out is another tile based puzzler, though I couldn’t quite work out what you were meant to do. Anyone have any ideas?

Well, contributor Ken Knight found the following via the comments:

“The only thing I figured out as regards the game play is that you can horizontally move the blocks on the 2 lines designated with a 1. These become brighter and then can’t be shifted. Perhaps that’s as far as the programming went as I can’t get anything further to happen.”

The presentation and initial preview seems fairly promising, and we guess that the coder just got bored or moved onto pastures new.

We’re not sure if the game got any further, but with a developer’s name to check out, we hope to solve the mystery behind the game soon.

This preview certainly is a mystery, and we guess this was a working title for a game cracked by Russ Michaels from his Ironfist days.

This is a simple multi-directional scroller where you control a space ship within a maze. There is no interaction with any objects or anything to really do apart from explore the map.

We have no clues to who was behind the game and if it got any further than this. We expect that this was planned as a budget title of somekind.

Do you know anything more about it?

Our next title is a conversion of an obscure 1984 Spectrum game by John Prince called Mr Wong’s Loopy Laundry. Not an official conversion, and one done some 24 years later by Peter Vass.

The game seems pretty complete, but is lacking in a few areas and has a few bugs overall.

It seems like it has been abandoned completely and may never get completed fully. Peter may shed some light on it at some point i’m sure.

Also known as Moonstone – A hard days knight, this is an unofficial conversion of the Mindscape Amiga game, and a very good start too which has been made!

There are some cool introduction sequence screens, followed by some brief actions scenes which you can control. It all looked very promising when first released to the world back in 2005.

It was coder Michelangelo Carbonara’s first serious attempt at programming on the Commodore 64, and the game was unfortunately dropped when he realized it had to depend too much on graphics. At the time, he didn’t know any graphic artists and everything was ripped from the Amiga.

Will it ever get completed and see the light of day? Michelangelo says that it could someday be redeveloped, now that he has a solid friendship with graphic artist Raffox – so watch this space.

For now, Michelangelo has dug out another preview of the game which has a bit more interactivity on the menus. On the menu screen, you can select the number of players and then go to “Select Knights” (Practice option not available) and you can choose the colour and edit the name of the knights. After which you get a map where you can select an area. There is a fight with a boar if you just press fire on the map. Each of the 4 players takes turns, and when all players have walked, there is a screen with the moon that announces the coming of a new day.

We hope that the coder does decide to resurrect the game again some day – but for now, check out what could have been.

Another cool looking Dungeons and Dragons preview goes into the archives, this time one from Kopido games which seemed to run out steam.

In this preview, you can move around a little bit – but there is no real gameplay at this stage. It’s more of a proof of concept it seems!

Did it get much further than this? We doubt it, but hopefully we’ll get some credits soon and find out what really happened to this game.