Preserving Cancelled & Unreleased Video Game History Since 1999
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.
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!
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!
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…
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.
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.
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, except for the Sinclair version. 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?
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!
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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