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.
Carl Muller did a fantastic job squeezing in Speedball 2 onto the Commodore 64 back in 1991. However, it was at a cost in various areas … and most notably was for some of the in-between screens.
Commodore Format in particular had printed a much higher quality version of the defeat image and larger than what was in the final game. Carl luckily still had it, so here it is:
Hopefully we may see more materials, and possibly earlier builds in the future.
Now for something which isn’t worth a full entry on the GTW64 site, but is worthy of a mention.
Recently a prototype of System 3’s 1991 racer/shooter Turbocharge on the Commodore 64 has been uncovered by TMR/Cosine, originally preserved to obtain its tunes. The main difference compared to the final game in this one level preview is that the game music is composed by Reyn Ouwehand, who was to be the original composer for the game. Music was switched to both Sean Connolly and Marc Francois towards the end of development.
Reyn’s music covers all sound channels in this version, compared to Sean/Marc’s music which was just 2 channels to leave the 3rd sound channel free for SFX.
From what I can see, there is very little else that is different compared to the final game – nothing seems to be that different graphically, though there may be some very subtle gameplay tweaks. The final game felt a little more solid.
You can now grab the turbocharge-proto file and play on an emulator. Enjoy!
Please visit our new GTW Vic 20 page at https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/vic-20-games-that-werent/
Many thanks to Mark Jones for helping to recover more bits and pieces from the original Flood 2 write up!. This includes many designs and mockups, as well as an interview and some disk based materials!
https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/2010/09/28/flood-2-bullfrog-so-close-yet-so-far%E2%80%A6/
Enjoy!
Although a few weeks old news now, with the addition just now of some previously unseen development materials, we thought it would be worth mentioning news on the main site about the up and coming new development.
That’s right, with the original salvaged materials – the game is finally to be completed with around 25 lines of parallax and 12 levels of action. The game is pretty much being done from scratch, improving vastly the amount that will be squeezed into the game.
More details, including the original and scrapped development from 1989 can be read about here: https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/hawkeye-2/
With thanks to Fabrizio Bartoloni regarding materials from the new version (which seems to have stalled).
After a few months offline, Games That Weren’t is back – with a slightly new lick of paint – though not too dissimilar to the old site.
So what happened?… Unfortunately the hosting disappeared and bang went all our content. Sadly with no access to the posts, I have had to scrape what I can from the Google caches and also the Web Archive. As a result, we have had a few casulties (In particular the Konix AMC’89 article sadly :-( ) , but most of the old site has been re-posted here and preserved.
Sadly the PCGTW and 3DO GTW sites are still unavailable, but i’m hoping these will be back soon!
The one positive thing to come out of everything is that it forced my hand to update the site and its functionality, with better Social media integration (and also a far better admin interface for us to use!).
So now on with the show!….
Dragons Lair was a technical marvel in the early 80s with its impressive Laser Disc technology. Elite jumped on the bandwagon with their licence of the popular cartoon series.
Whereas Dragons Lair was heavily changed for its home conversions, Elite decided to go one better. Originally starting out as a text only adventure, the plan for Scooby Doo grew to include pictures and finally extra interactivity to turn it into an 8-bit laser disc game.
1985 Ultimate
Lunar Jetman was part of a huge classic genre on the Spectrum that spawned a few games by Ultimate featuring the Jetman character. The range of games however never quite made their way onto the C64. Spectrum users had Jetman, whereas C64 users had to make do with Sir Arthur Pendragon in a series of games.
A big thanks to Paul Drury for flagging this up for GTW after a recent Retro Gamer magazine article with Larry DeMar.
After Vid Kidz had delivered Stargate to Williams, Larry had begun working on a new project called “Conquest”
Larry recalls: I didnt get very far as Robotron got so interesting, so quickly, I jumped off Conquest to join Eugene on that. You were a ship roughly in the centre of a screen of a 2D universe. It played with controls like Omega Race; you had a wheel for your rotation and then thrust and fire. It was quite elegant and had a scanner for the space but then we heard Sinistar was in development, so we put it to one side and never finished it. If wed concentrated on it, we probably wouldve beaten Sinistar to market by a year.
Larry kept the source code and Retro Gamer originally printed some exclusive screenshots from this intriguing lost title. Paul has passed higher quality shots from the article which you can check out below in our gallery.
Larry additionally had to add: “The ship that we created for this prototype (which would have been replaced) was an homage to the ship from Computer Space.
The Red and Yellow globs on the upper right are the players shots which were animated fireballs. The circles is the explosion of a planet which is in progress. This program which generated these circular explosions was the same one we later used to create the Time Tunnel in Blaster. There was very little game here. At this point I had created the 2-D scrolling world, the ship control, the scanner, the ship’s fireball shots, the collision detection and explosions and enemy tracking for end of wave. At this point we learned about Williams Sinistar project and put it on the shelf.”
Many thanks to Paul Drury for the information, and Larry DeMar for originally talking to Paul and sharing information on his long lost game.
A highlighted review from the http://www.gtw64.co.uk archives
Designed as the sequel to the highly thought of Star Fleet, Star Fleet II was aimed at being bigger, better and more complex than its already complex predecessor. Both were war simulation games where you controlled ships and armies, in the first game with the aim of defending Earth from aliens and in Star Fleet II you played as the aliens, intent of conquering planets throughout the universe.
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.
