Preserving Cancelled & Unreleased Video Game History Since 1999
Welcome to Games That Weren't!
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 online since 1999, and long before that offline.
Please Browse our archive and discover the many entries that we host for many different platforms.
A very short entry for now regarding a game which was produced by Karl Hörnell during his Players Software development days.
The game was called Commodore Juicer, and would be a Super Pipeline clone, but instead of oil – there would be fruits travelling along a conveyor belt towards a juice machine.
The game was actually going to be submitted to Commodore User for distribution with the magazine, but it never quite made it for reasons as yet unknown. It is not yet known if the game was completed or not.
When asked about potentially adding his unreleased games to the website, Karl declined – citing that these were titles that he was not happy with and are something which should never see the light of day.
Hopefully some day we may get to put up a screen shot or two for the site and hope that Karl gets his early work preserved before the tapes deteriorate.
A very short entry for now regarding a game which was produced by Karl Hörnell during his Players Software development days.
The game was called Clod Jumper, and would involve controlling a guy who could step inside a robot suit, but wouldn’t be very mobile – so you would have to get out of the suit to negotiate ladders and different obstacles. Sounds a lot like Antiriad!
The game was actually going to be entered into a £10,000 competition in C&VG, but the deadline ran out – and that was that. It is believed the game was almost finished.
When asked about potentially adding his unreleased games to the website, Karl declined – citing that these were titles that he was not happy with and are something which should never see the light of day.
Hopefully some day we may get to put up a screen shot or two for the site and hope that Karl gets his early work preserved before the tapes deteriorate.
A very short entry for now regarding a game which was produced by a young Karl Hörnell when he was around 14.
The game was Chopperman and was a clone of Chopper Command from the Atari VCS, done at a time when there were not many games around for the C64 in his homeland of Sweden.
Karl even produced his own custom inlay and created a fantasy software house called Center Soft. This was just before getting involved with Interceptor Software.
When asked about potentially adding the games to the website, Karl declined – citing that these were titles that he was not happy with and are something which should never see the light of day.
Hopefully some day we may get to put up a screen shot or two for the site and hope that Karl gets his early work preserved before the tapes deteriorate.
A very short entry for now regarding a game which was produced by a young Karl Hörnell when he was around 14.
The game was Hex-Bert, and we believe was a Frogger clone done at a time when there were not many games around for the C64 in his homeland of Sweden.
Karl even produced his own custom inlay and created a fantasy software house called Center Soft. This was just before getting involved with Interceptor Software.
When asked about potentially adding the games to the website, Karl declined – citing that these were titles that he was not happy with and are something which should never see the light of day.
Hopefully some day we may get to put up a screen shot or two for the site and hope that Karl gets his early work preserved before the tapes deteriorate.
A very short entry for now regarding a game which was produced by a young Karl Hörnell when he was around 14.
The game was Qrazy Qber, and was a Qbert clone done at a time when there were not many games around for the C64 in his homeland of Sweden.
Karl even produced his own custom inlay and created a fantasy software house called Center Soft. This was just before getting involved with Interceptor Software.
When asked about potentially adding the games to the website, Karl declined – citing that these were titles that he was not happy with and are something which should never see the light of day.
Hopefully some day we may get to put up a screen shot or two for the site and hope that Karl gets his early work preserved before the tapes deteriorate.
Not to be confused with the game of the same name by Firebird in 1984, Circus Circus was to be a new game from Martech in 1989 on the Spectrum, C64 and Amstrad platforms.
The game would feature a series of events including Lion Taming, High Diving, Trapeze work and was due for release in November/December time of that year. The game on the Spectrum was being developed by Creative Reality, who had previously done Rex for Martech.
Sadly it was never to be, and apart from a demo released for the Spectrum – nothing of the other formats ever surfaced as Martech went under even before the Spectrum version could make it out.
It is believed that Circus Circus on the C64 may have had no development even started due to similar reasons to Rex, where Martech had no C64 programmers to hand and were looking to move to the 16-bits. It’s early days yet!
A quick entry of another Rocky Horror show game which CRL were planning to release, which was to be written up as a (slightly different?) story by Richard O’Brien and then converted to a game. This was following on from the arcade adventure game which had just been released.
The game according to Computer Gamer magazine was being written by Bored of the Rings author Fergus McNeil and was mentioned at the end of the Rocky Horror Show game ending.
But what happened to the game? It never surfaced, not even with any screenshots.
We tracked down Fergus McNeill, who had completely forgotten about the game. He confirms though sadly that the game never got past the initial idea stage (though he did enjoy an eventful lunch meeting with Richard O’Brien to discuss the idea!). Fergus couldn’t recall how the game could have panned out – as the memories faded midway through their lunch!
But this confirms that the game was never started and disappeared without a trace as quick as the idea came up. Unless someone turns up with something to quash this, it is pretty much case closed already!
Body Slam was a SEGA arcade game featuring female wrestlers doing battle in the ring. It was fairly obscure, not not obscure enough though for Firebird to take up the licence it seems, with Software Creations behind the conversion work.
A conversion was completed by Jonathan French, who had previously converted Agent X 2 to the C64, with Wayne Blake (Mermaid Madness, Psycho Pigs UXB, Raw Recruit) on graphics and Tim Follin on music.
Oddly though, the game doesn’t seem to have ever got a full release – though it has existed on the scene for many years for download. Richard Hewison of the Bird Sanctuary website believes that the game was earmarked for released on the new Silverbird label (in the same way that Atari’s Peter Pack Rat was, also written by Software Creations). For reasons unknown, it just never happened. Maybe the licence expired?
The game never got a conversion for the other 8-bits, so this seems to have been a C64 exclusive, though a conversion did appear for the Master System (as Pro Wrestling – thanks to GabeMoralesVR for flagging up) – but was nothing to do with Firebird or Software Creations.
Interestingly, collector Mat Allen found a master disk some time back – and has dug out and created a G64 image of it for the archives, which you can find in the download links. Just why didn’t the game get a release though?
Here it is anyway – we hope to hear from Jonathan French at some point to confirm what happened. Watch this space!
I loved the original Rent-a-cop game when it was released in the 2012 RGCD games competition. It was a brilliant tribute to Activision’s Keystone Capers game on the Atari VCS.
So when I heard about a new “reloaded” edition coming out, I was naturally quite excited. This time only some of the Keystone Capers feel was to be kept, with the reloaded edition to feature more shooting/platform action… maybe not too different to Lethal Weapon on the C64?
James Monkman was giving input to the creator Achim Volkers, who suggested having different stages like harbour, storage depot, museum and more. The Harbour level was done, with the AI almost complete. Enemies weren’t quite shooting, but it wasn’t far away.
Work paused whilst Vice Squad was finished off, and then after starting Darkness and other titles – Achim lost interest and decided to sign off the project and release what was started.
It is a huge shame to have to add this very promising preview – but sometimes you have to ditch the things you don’t want to work on. It is part and parcel of doing game development in limited time as a hobby on the C64 – you have to enjoy the game you’re working on :) But here it is for you to check out!
A very quick entry to cover what seems to be a James Bond title which got caught up in the video game collapse of 1984.
According to online sources, Parker Bros were planning to release a game based on the film Octopussy from the year before. The game was promised prominently for the Atari 2600 platform, with adverts not mentioning the C64 platform (unless you have seen it – if so, please contact us!).
It is very much early days on this title – it may well be a red herring, but until then we’ll create an entry to place a marker of intent on finding out more about this title. The James Bond 007 Parker Bros game was actually released, but is a completely different game.
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