Games That Weren't^®

Cola Quest is a promising and early icon-driven graphic adventure, which seems to have been in development sometime during the 90’s, but didn’t get too far.

The preview that we have here just seems to have a single screen with limited interaction, but gives a good indication of the icon set and how it would have worked.

It was looking good overall, and so we begin the search to find out what happened to the game and if it ever got much further than this. Was it ever intended for a software company of the time?

Watch this space

Candyman is a very early preview of what seems to be a large multi-directional platformer.

At this stage, you have a main character which can be flown around the map, with no jumping mechanic in place at this point in time.

There are a few enemies dotted around and some collision tests, but that is about it so far.

Was this abandoned early on, or is there a more complete version of the game with more of the mechanics in place?

Richard Bayliss confirmed that he did the original music, but Danny disappeared and the game as a result seems to certainly have been abandoned. The game was to be launched on TND’s website.

What was the intention for the game, and why also was it canned? Can Danny ever be contacted about the game?

Well, Danny contacted us via the comments page here, and confirms that the game was abandoned due to a lack of time. The game was to be a shooter game with 2D scrolling, but the preview online was all that will ever be of the game!

Case closed!

For many years we had been waiting for a decent Puzzle Bobble clone, then Monster Buster happened in 2013 as part of the RGCD competition.

Before that, there were a few attempts at converting the game – and Busta was one of those more successful looking conversions. Back in 2001, a very promising preview was released with up to two players. It was lacking a bit of polish, but the mechanics all seemed to be in place.

It seems strange that a conversion looking so good would be left to collect dust, but that is what happened to Busta. Possibly Daniel Berntsson had other projects come up which took over life.

We hope to hear from Daniel sometime to find out exactly what happened, and maybe if there is anything more to the game out there to be discovered.

Wow, D-Lite certainly get around and they certainly struggled to get a game finished it seems – with Brickwall adding to their increasing profile of unreleased titles.

This one comes from 1995, and seems to be the early beginnings of a sort of zoo mania style game, but it doesn’t seem to be fully playable (unless i’ve missed something?)

It is possible that this particular game was cancelled due to the C64 market disappearing by this point. We don’t have any leads on the coder apart from a credit for the musician.

Do you know anything more about this game?

It’s always a shame when you come across a title which is still fairly recent, but seems to have just been left by the wayside.

Brickout is one such game, which when released back in 2007 in its preview form, won a lot of fans for whoever played it. It was a great conversion of a popular Android/PC game.

Overall it looks pretty complete, and not really needing a huge amount to finish it all off. Just what happened to the game and will it ever be finished?

We hope to find out from the developers very soon!

This is another game by the D-Lite guys, who seemed to knock a few unfinished games out during the early 90’s. Now add Boxes to the list.

I think this preview could well be broken – selecting different buildings gives the same thing and I can’t seem to do anything in the game. Do you know anything more about this game?

The preview comes with a promising title screen, but there seems to be litle else at this stage. What sort of game was it to be and what happened to it?

Bounch is a very simple maze game where you must guide a ball to the end, which constantly moves when you get started.

It’s sort of like a flat version of Codemaster’s Tilt game and its playable enough, but clear this is at the very early stages with little in the way of presentation.

A few levels exist, and then that is it – so either the programmer got bored or went onto pastures new. We hope to find out soon, with a coder name which we can try and get in touch with some day. Did anything more exist of it?

Martin got in touch and confirmed that he wrote the game when he was just 14, and probably got spread via disk swapping at the time via snail mail. The game was inspired by The Bubble Tale by Crest and was just done for fun overall.

Martin suggests he may well finish it some day! Case closed!

A simple and early vertically scrolling game from an unknown period, and which has surfaced from an unknown source it seems.

It’s a very early stage game and there doesn’t seem to be a trace of who was behind the work. It is just part of a simple map with some random sprites thrown over the top.

The name is likely to have been made up by the cracking crew, so it may be very difficult to establish who was behind this game and what the real intentions were.

Do you know any more about this game?

We’re not entirely sure if this game was done for the intention of selling, it’s still early days to know.

The content of this text adventure suggests it was done as a bit of fun.

This game seems to have been floating around for many years and has been digitally preserved, coded by someone calling themselves Boba Fette – who was part of a number of groups in the mid to late 80’s. This was one of Boba Fette’s only bits of code, before he later went onto the Amiga platform.

He’s based in the US and has updated his CSDB profile in recent years, so we hope to hear more soon and find out what happened to this game!

The Attack of the Blue Bomber is a great little game – a clone of Fort Apocalypse and Airwolf by Elite. You must navigate your blue helicopter through a series of tight caverns, avoiding lasers and fired missiles.

You must also shoot your way through parts of the background to progress and shoot little question mark icons to get bonus points. The start screen suggests there could be a number of levels, though I didn’t have chance to play fully all the way through.

It seems odd that this preview didn’t seem to be completed, or was the game ever actually complete?

Well, thanks to an anonymous contributor (thanks!), we learn that the creator was Canadian and has a page that talks a little about the game here: http://wandel.ca/homepage/computers.html   Markus Wandel had the following to say:

“I wanted to be a programmer just as good as the pros, and because most of the professional product we saw was video games, and because one of the better ones was “Fort Apocalypse” I just had to write my own smooth scrolling helicopter-in-a-dungeon game.

Looking back at it now it is unimaginative but it plays OK, click on the image to download a disk image to try it on an emulator. The only thing missing is the second half of the third level, the dungeon simply ends and you fly out into black nothingness. If anyone cares, the source code and the cobbled-together tools used to make this game are all on the disk image too.”

We have grabbed a copy of the game from Markus’ site and added to the archives here, which includes the source code if anyone wants to play around with the game. Markus also had some disk images with his utilities and other works, which we’ve also added here. It is clear that it was never properly released or finished, so this is very much a case closed!