Welcome to Games That Weren't 64!

We cover Cancelled & Unreleased Video games for the Commodore 64 computer. A non-profit large archive dedicated to preserving lost games that were never released to the public, as well as prototypes and the odd preservation of released titles. Our aim to share history and stories from the developers, assets and more before it is too late. GTW has been preserving lost video game history since 1999, and long before that offline.

Please Browse our archive and discover the many entries that we host and have saved over the years.

Latest News and Posts

Keith Purkiss C64 Archive

Posted: by Frank Gasking

Keith Purkiss was a regular games creator on the Commodore 64 back in the mid-late 80’s and early 1990s, and also created a few games under the pseudonym of Pakman for titles like Dragon Spirit and Little Puff. During his Probe days, he worked on the likes of Tiger Road, Rygar and Lazer Tag which would be released by U.S. Gold / Go!

Although in touch for a few years now, Keith reached out in 2024 after digging out all of his work disks. These would contain unreleased titles such as 666 – Number of the Beast, Aladdin’s Cave, Apprentice and a completely different version of Wacky Races. The links for these pages go to the individual entries we have set up that talk in more detail about those titles. Continue reading →

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Insect Kill and Clean All

Posted: , last updated: by Frank Gasking

As part of our Christmas 2024 GTW64 update – our next post isn’t quite unreleased games material, but are a set of yet unpreserved Polish games that were released in 1994 and have been preserved thanks to Marcin ‘Tenchi’ Świętoniewski.

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Insect Kill and Clean All are essentially strange hacks of Mario Bros by AtariSoft, with added music, different titles and sprites – but essentially the same gameplay.

Both were produced for the Polish market, and came with a strange copy protection where you had to attach a black box cartridge to be able to load the tapes (which is ironic considering that the games themselves are pirated). Continue reading →

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IK+ design and development notes

Posted: , last updated: by Frank Gasking

For the past year, we have been preserving Archer Maclean’s legacy, saving his source code and various design notes. You can see some of our examples here of recent work as we start to take a look at prototypes and unused materials.

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Backflip animations – possibly traced from the film Grease (Thanks Avram for the heads up!)

On the request of Chris Wilkins of Fusion Retro Books, we have preserved many work disks of Archer’s – but have also scanned in a plethora of documents and notes which Archer created as he developed his games. These give a fascinating insight into Archer’s process and attention to detail when developing the game. Continue reading →

Posted in Commodore 64 (C64), Preservation | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Games That Weren’t featured in 2025 Zzap!64 annual!

Posted: by Frank Gasking

The 2025 Zzap!64 annual has arrived and looks great! The biggest surprise was the six page Games That Weren’t tribute feature by Ian Osborne, who had created the article that inspired it all. Talking about how some of the titles in his article were expanded upon.

I kept over the years misspelling Ian’s surname, and seems there were more I’d missed from old write ups on the site. Now fixed, and my apologies once more Ian. I can assure there are no more misspellings and I’ve double checked. Thank you so much for the lovely words!

Order your copy at https://fusionretrobooks.com/collections/2025annuals/products/zzap-64-annual-2025

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GTW Highlight No.12: The Godfather breakthroughs (SEGA Master System)

Posted: , last updated: by Frank Gasking

GTW Highlight No.12: June was certainly busy, and we did a huge investigation into The Godfather on the Sega Master System + others. It vanished after a rough first cut that wasn’t up to scratch. We made some big breakthroughs in terms of who worked on it:

https://gamesthatwerent.com/2024/06/the-godfather/

Posted in Atari ST, Commodore 64 (C64), Commodore Amiga, GTW64 news, News, SEGA Master System | Tagged | Leave a comment

GTW Highlight No.03: IK and IK+ prototypes saved (Commodore 64)

Posted: , last updated: by Frank Gasking

GTW Highlight No.3: Our annual #Commodore64 Christmas update saw various International Karate and IK+ prototypes recovered, with other Archer Maclean materials and many other games preserved for the first time. What will we have this year I wonder?

https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/2023/12/gtw64-christmas-update-2023/

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