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.
A highlighted review from the http://www.gtw64.co.uk archives
1987 Games Designers Workshop
Chickamauga was going to be a stragetic war game, of which there are many on the C64. Its scheduled release was for 1987, by Games Designers Workshop (GDW), an American company who already had a fine pedigree in board games and RPGs by the 1980s, having formed in 1973. Continue reading
Black Shadow C64 Games That Werent
CRL 1988
Addition by Alex Ross: Sadly it seems there was no conversion whatsoever for the C64 on Black Shadow. CRL head honcho, Clem Chambers wrote to us to explain that although the magazine did indeed say a C64 port was being made, this was often said to magazines in the gap between production of the original and it’s release, giving the company time to find someone to actually do a port.
So not only does it look like Black Shadow was never made in any form on the C64, but it seems many other games we have down as GTW’s, will have only existed as a potential game and no work would ever have been done on them. However, we’ll keep looking until we have a definitive answer, believe it or not we actually find this sort of thing fun.
Creator Speaks: Clem Chambers –
There was no C64 version. Often versions were said to be in production when they werent and you would be looking for a coder to do the port and you would never find them or they failed in the attempt. The lead time between interview and press publication is sufficiently long to port a game so often statements were speculative.
I dont remember ever seeing anything on the C64 for Black Shadow, Id even forgotten the title on the Amiga.
Force of the Vulcan GTW64 review
Alex Ross
Kele Line Games
1987
Kele Line games were a Danish games company, who now are probably most famous for their excellent title, The Vikings. They only released two other games, Tiger Mission and Zyrons Escape, before disappearing into the forgotten mists of C64 nostalgia.
However, they did have another four games slated for release, one of which was Force of the Vulcan. Nothing is known about this game other than its brief mention in issue 2 of Computer Action. It was due to be released in late 1987, the same year as The Vikings and Tiger Mission, but the company went bankrupt towards the end of the year.
Whether this game was due to be a licensed Star Trek game is unknown, though if that was the case then it is likely that there would be more information about the game available. As it is we can presume it would be a sci-fi game, as the reference to Vulcan would suggest (unless its a game about vulcanised rubber).
Its a shame Kele Line didnt manage to make it in the games industry, The Vikings, Kele Lines best received game, was written by Soren Gronbech, who would later go on to program for the Amiga with Sword of Soden possibly being his most famous game.
The was originally posted on the central GTW site a couple of years back, luckily for Frank I archive things obsessively and thus still had all the files and details on my computer. Enjoy!
The story of Berserker Works is similar to many software houses in the 1980s. Set up as a small company with only one or two people at the helm, it released several games over the years before running out of steam in the late 1980s, having never managed to secure the major distribution needed to gain a profitable foothold in the industry.
The difference with Berserker Works is that it was created and run by best-selling science fiction and fantasy author, Fred Saberhagen, who by the 1980s had been writing books for over twenty years. He had seen the rising interest in computer games and believed that it would only grow, and felt it would be a good idea to create a story that would make a great computer game. What he came up with, the Book of Swords, was too complex for the technology of the time, but Berserker Works (named after his science fiction series based around a race of death machines known as the Berserkers) was created and he pressed ahead with getting programmers involved to help him realise various concepts he and his wife, Joan, came up with.
Ah ‘Flood’… The memories had with this awesome Amiga game back in the day. With its groundbreaking speech effects throughout, Flood proved to be a big hit on the ST/Amiga back in 1990, and so it was inevitable that a sequel would follow. This time the main character, Quiffy, would also look to make an appearance on 16-bit consoles which were starting to take a hold on the gaming public alongside home computers.
The game was being developed by non other than ex-Ocean coder Paul Hughes with graphics by Mark R Jones (Who also worked at Ocean).
Flood 2 promised more of the same of the first game, with a multitude of additional features and bits to improve further on the original (Which sadly and undeservedly never had the full spotlight treatment on its original release). Continue reading
Thanks to Peter Weighill for the heads up, but some exciting developments over at the World of Spectrum as Mark R Jones has uncovered a rather rare and previously unpreserved clone of the arcade game Popeye cheekily called “Popie“.
Popie looks to be a rather nifty little conversion and certainly the best which the machine has seen. Currently the game has been preserved and we are now awaiting a release on the World Of Spectrum which should be very iminant. Keep an eye out on the new WOS entry which has just popped up.
Another great finding for the ZX Spectrum!
Sources
A short post about Simon Cooke’s SAM Coupe contributions. His unreleased contributions include Populous(incomplete), Bubble Bobble (unattainable license, 1991), Zub (link to download from there – unfinished, but screenshots exist).
Unrelated to Sam Coupe but of great importance is that he worked on a finished cool-looking (at least judging from shots) Prince of Persia conversion to Spectrum that got scrapped due to licence issues, this is a different one from the Russian adaptation made later by another team.
After a long rescue mission, at long last the lost C64 conversion of The Bubbler has been found and released. The added bonus is that the game is fully complete, containing the loading picture, music and sfx.
Developer Matt Young, Sailor/Triad and Jazzcat have been busy at work and reconstructing things into its final state, whilst compressing and bug fixing. The download contains two versions, a trained version and the standard version. All instructions are included.
Although the frame rate suffers due to Ultimates demands on how the display worked, it is a massive finding and still as playable as the Spectrum original. Its yet another one for the archives! Go check it out!
Interesting find on our travels, but as some may well know – the Spectrum version of S.T.U.N Runner wasnt particularly great (Well, the C64 version was only marginally better, but thats not saying much).
However, things could have been a whole lot better it seems, and the postage stamp sized play area could well have been extended. Check out the preview shots here:
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/showmag.cgi?mag=Crash/Issue83/Pages/Crash8300015.jpg
Then compare to the released game shots here:
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0004965
A rather different game from the looks of things. Was it merely a set of mockups (Like with what happened to Nemesis on the Spectrum), or was it an earlier version that was canned? One for a bit more research I think
Evan Gowan over at the excellent Snes Central website has produced a fantastic and heavily researched/documented article on Starfox 2, giving the most complete story about the game that has so far been seen. Id highly recommend checking it out!
This includes many items from various magazines, interviews with internal people and picking apart the sources which were recovered and documenting little findings in there, plus a lot more about the game that sadly never was (And one of the best to never hit the SNES).
Go grab a coffee and have a good read
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.
