Welcome to Games That Weren't!

We are a 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 online since 1999, and long before that offline.

Please Browse our archive and discover the many entries that we host for many different platforms.

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Spider Chase

A short entry for a title which was written by a young Tim Wright whilst he was at school.

The game was called Spider Chase, and it was a Scramble clone which was sold only to kids in his playground.

Luckily the game has survived, though is yet to be fully backed up. It is hoped that Tim will some day get the game preserved and running again for people to check out.

Not much else is known about the game, so take a look at the hand created inlay for now, and hopefully we’ll find out more soon!

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 2 Comments

Vertical scroller

Another title which was found on the disks of Cory Kin, but we believe this was a demo downloaded from Compunet at some point.

Upon loading up the game, it doesn’t look like much – but you can move around a character which moves around in all directions across a small map with some kind of overhead housing area.

You can’t do much apart from move around the map, so was this just a test of some kind? Or was there a fully fledged game to come out of the demo?

We don’t know sadly who was behind the game, but hopefully they will find this page by pure chance and let us know. Or maybe you’ve seen this before?

More research needed for this one, but check out the preview for now…

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Mega Moto

A very short entry for a title which may have been something advertised in early magazines.

The game was to be released by Playsoft and seemed to be part of a series of 3 games in total which includes Infer, Mega Moto and Phantom Rider.

Thanks to Marco Das, we can confirm that it was just an Italian hacked version of Red Max. Here you can grab the download to check it out.

Case closed!

 

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Infer

A very short entry for a title which may have been something advertised in early magazines.

The game was to be released by Playsoft, but we know very little else apart from this. The game is also part of a series of 3 games in total which includes Infer, Mega Moto and Phantom Rider.

Thanks to Marco Das, we can confirm that it was just an Italian hacked version of Deactivators. The hack hasn’t yet been preserved, so hopefully this will be done in time. As you can see – it does sit within a collector’s archive.

Case closed!

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 5 Comments

Phantom Rider

A very short entry for a title which may have been something advertised in early magazines.

The game was to be released by Playsoft, but we know very little else apart from this. The game is also part of a series of 3 games in total which includes Infer, Mega Moto and Phantom Rider.

Thanks to Marco Das, we can confirm that it was just an Italian hacked version of Deactivators. The hack hasn’t yet been preserved, so hopefully this will be done in time. As you can see – it does sit within a collector’s archive.

Case closed!

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 4 Comments

Dr Bongo’s Safari Park

A very short entry for a title which was advertised early on the C64’s life by an obscure postal based company called Custom Software.

In the advert, the game was described as follows:

“Dr Bongo’s plan is to destroy the world, with only hours before his devastaging missiles are launched you locate his position. Your mission is to stop him and be the world’s no.1 hero. The only problem is that he is on a small island in the middle of a Safari Park, and you are outside the main gates, on foot.”

The game seems to have had a very limited release and it seems to be pretty much at large at the moment. A review from Sinclair User June 1983 was made, and the review was not that positive. Suggesting that the game was even completely written in BASIC and slow.

Was the game ever actually released on the C64 properly? If so, where is it and can it be found?

Do you know anything more about this title?

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Black Knight 2

A very quick entry for a proposed sequel which doesn’t seem to ever got past the planning stage.

Black Knight was a late game in the C64’s life, coming out in 1996 and released by Polish games company TimSoft. It was a fair game, but a bit repetitive with its screens.

The ending was revealed recently on C64 Endings, where apart from the Knight and Princess having sex (!), there was mention that Black Knight 2 would be coming soon. It never did, and we were left without a sequel.

It is possible that by the end of 1996, TimSoft decided to call time on the C64 – and any plans for a Black Knight sequel were scarpered. We don’t expect there to have been anything started, but we hope to confirm from the coder himself at somepoint soon!

Watch this space!

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Evasion

A short entry for a title flagged up to us by Dan Warren, which is listed as being a Ubi Soft game – but from a bit of initial digging around, we couldn’t find any reference to it online apart from its entry in GB64.

The game is a neat looking isometric game (like Head Over Heels) and was written and designed by a chap called Frederic Kauffman, and is listed as a 1988 release – however it doesn’t seem to be finished, as there is no sprite collision or anything to actually do.

What was this game exactly and was it really for Ubisoft? And how did it sneak out?

Possibly only Frederic himself may know, so hopefully in time we will find him to ask him more about the game. In the meantime, do you know anything about it? Maybe it was finished under a different name?

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3D Roam

3D Roam was a game which was due to be released by Swedish company Handic back in the early 80’s, but sadly was never to be (for reasons as yet unknown). It was to be part of a trilogy of games by Arne Fernlund, consisting of Space Action, Space Trap and 3D Roam.

It is believed that the game was possibly dropped due to Handic not feeling the 3D glasses element was too much to add to the release. The game actually does support 3D glasses, and according to sources seems to work very well.

The game is a 3D based game where you control a snake robot in space, with a great looking moving starfield and special effects as you destroy as many Ploffs and Blurps as possible with the snake robot after picking up a special power pill. It’s a very nice game for its age, and a huge shame it never got released.

The game was recently released by Genesis Project and salvaged from Arne’s own work tape, with the final finished copy salvaged after 30 years of gathering dust. It has been a brilliant find, and yet another long lost game saved!

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