Unreleased & Cancelled Video Games across many platforms.
We are an Unreleased and Cancelled 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 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 video game history since 1999.
Our next title is an interesting looking side-on action RPG title that was due for release on the PC Engine by Intec around 1992 time.
A few mentions were made in PCEngineFan over the years, which included two screenshots showing a forest scene where you fight against some bad guys, and then face a large wolf-like boss. Continue reading
Thanks to Fabrizio Bartoloni for flagging up, but Atari Mania have recently announced recovery of four games by General Masters Corporation for the Atari 400/800 which apparently were never released:
Great to see yet more lost software being found and preserved!
Whilst working to recover the late Archer Maclean’s work disks, we discovered a few things which surprised us. As well as games, Archer also did a bit of freelance development work outside of games – including this oil demonstration for old British Oil company Carless.
According to Archer’s C.V, it was November 1983 that he decided to become a freelance programmer to earn a reasonable income. The very first job he would secure was to produce an animated graphics demonstration program for Carless. Continue reading
A short entry for a Java Platform mobile conversion of a classic platformer title that many of us know and love. Nebulus (or Tower Toppler as known in other regions) was about to be playable on the go thanks to Player One Limited, who announced the game in 2006.
Being developed in J2ME, unfortunately the conversion would disappear quickly without a trace and never surfaced for reasons currently unknown. Continue reading
Games That Weren’t has been running for a quarter of a century this year, which is not only staggering, but also a bit scary if I’m honest. For 25 years, we have been documenting and preserving as much unreleased software as we can for a variety of platforms. Though it all began with just the Commodore 64 at the start, the machine I grew up with and still play today.
When first starting out, I never quite expected this to be a project with no end in sight (which isn’t great for someone who has ‘completist‘ elements to their personality), but that is indeed exactly what Games That Weren’t is. No matter how many games we manage to save and preserve their stories, we will never capture them all, and tragically there will be many that are forever lost.
There are so many unreleased games out there, and quite often I get people get in touch and ask “Why haven’t you covered X game on the site?“, and probably always will do. Regardless of scrambling to try and cover what we can, it has been a fun and exciting 25 years of trying to do as much as possible during our free time to preserve gaming history.
To mark this milestone, I thought I’d share how everything started and gradually progressed over the years, including some of our highlights and major findings along the way. Separately I’ve done a video covering the same sort of thing in a more visual way, if you need boring monotonous ramblings to send you calmly to sleep.
As has been well documented in the past (and to death!) on our About page, it was Ian Osborne’s “That Was The Game That Wasn’t” article that first inspired interest in the area of unreleased games to a young 11 year old version of myself. I was surprised to learn that there were games being made, and sometimes even completed, which we apparently had no chance of being able to play. The fact that we supposedly couldn’t play them, made me more curious and wanting to know exactly what those games were like. Were we missing a potential classic of our time, or had we been spared for instance? Continue reading
Thanks to documentary creator Moleman, here is a documentary regarding a cancelled Star Trek game that was being developed for Activision back in 2003 by Hungarian development team – Digital Reality.
Here is a deleted scenes video (which is in Hungarian, so you may need to switch on subtitles), and you can visit moleman4.com to view the entire movie.
It is a big week, as we celebrate our 25th Anniversary of Games That Weren’t. It’s also our monthly update to the Commodore 64 archive, with plenty of new and updated materials for you to check out.
To tie in with the 25th Anniversary celebrations which are due on the site this Wednesday, we have also hit a significant milestone with 2,500 entries now available within the GTW64 archive. Since 1999, we have been building the archive and recovering many unreleased games for the Commodore 64 for you to check out!
Ok, I admit – to get up to that magic number, I may have made sure that I added at least 6 new entries this month. This includes news of a possible US version of Strider and some other promising titles which sadly seem to have been abandoned.
Bacillus, Beat Em Up, Bruce Lee 2, Galencia Khaos Sphere, Infared, Strider USA
Then we have quite a few updates and changes to 24 titles, with a lot of updates thanks to Anonymous Contributor. Each page has a “History” segment which explains what has changed.
ABC, Arthur, Breaker, Bushido Warrior, Chart Breaker, Euchre for Four, Field of Fire, Goremium, Habitat, Horror Drive, Koshimo, Lotya, Mindsmear, Orbital Run, Piracy, Quest for Cyrus, Starfighter One, Starglider 2, Super Elite, Super Pinball, Super Stardust, Time Scanner V1, Twintris, Ultra Games
See you all next month, and look out for the 25th Anniversary post coming up in a day or so!
Also known as Diz564, our next entry isn’t technically an ‘unreleased game’ – but an ‘unreleased cut down version of a released game’.
Spellbound Dizzy was one of Dizzy’s last adventures on the ZX Spectrum back in 1991 (with Crystal Kingdom Dizzy still to appear) – first released through the Dizzy’s Excellent Adventures pack (which is how I first played the game in January 1992). Unfortunately, Commodore 64 owners felt a little bit short changed when they finally got playing their copy… Continue reading
The BBC Micro sadly hasn’t been graced with a huge number of official arcade conversions, but we have seen many different clones and even a Bubble Bobble conversion that never saw the light of day.
Seemingly out there for sometime, there was also a Donkey Kong Jnr. conversion done officially for Atarisoft. What is intriguing is that the conversion was being carried out by none-other than Adrian Stephens, who had earlier produced Killer Gorilla for Micro Power. Continue reading
Yet another late Amiga conversion, which sadly seems to have fallen by the wayside due to the dwindling market at the time. NBA Jam Tournament Edition was a particularly high profile title which could have given supporters a huge boost, but it was just never to be.
According to Amiga Joker magazine, the game was being developed for the Commodore Amiga 1200, 4000 and CD32 platforms. It’s likely that something only existed on the A1200/A4000 overall – if at all! Continue reading
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Games That Weren't® is the registered trademark of Frank Gasking.
