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.
Below is a digest of recent additions and updates that have been made since the last update, including a new release game!
Captain Fizz V1 recovered and released!
A very odd entry into the GTW64 database, with what seems to be a practically complete conversion of Captain Fizz, but by a different coder. Scrapped likely due to the slow down issues and re-started by another dev. Enjoy!
Before and since the recovery of the infamous Sigue Sigue Sputnik from oblivion, we wanted to always learn more about the game via its creator, Tony (Gibbo) Gibson. Attempts had been in vain though sadly.
Collect seaweed and throw at famous politicians – Seaside Special, political themed gaming at its best!
Mark Harrison popped up early this year though, and we both shared notes to try and find Tony. We both found a YouTube channel (with a number of music remixes) and other pages which Tony had created, which hadn’t been updated since around 2012. Sadly our initial fears were confirmed when Mark Harrison got hold of Tony’s son a few weeks ago. Tony very sadly passed away in 2013 after a battle with cancer.
Well, after an entertaining 2015 – the work continues. We begin 2016 with some quick new entries and a bunch of updates to some existing titles. Sadly nothing new to play, but that will change soon. Watch this space!
Mystery solving has been something we’ve been doing for years now, though there are many times that we hit dead ends and just cannot progress any further. Solving the mystery of who the 80’s development group “Softeam” were exactly is of those dead ends that we have recently hit.
So where did 2015 go? Only feels like the other month I was doing last years special update :) It’s been a massive year, with one of the most important lost C64 games finally found amongst one of our most busiest years – and yet there is still plenty more to find and are continuing to be found!
We hope you all have a great holiday and new year, and we’ll see you again in 2016 with more discoveries (of which we have some brilliant ones lined up!). But for now, enjoy today’s offerings:
Sigue Sigue Sputnik found
The legendary (and almost thought to be mythical) title has been found in believed to be its final state. This long lost Tony Gibson game is pretty wacky and sadly never got picked up by any publishers at the time to be completed.
Richard Bayliss has fixed up Video Images’ Urban Warrior game, so that it is now as originally intended. Complete with linked loading screen, map fix and music.
Ash and Dave were working on a few titles that didn’t get very far at all. For most, we have managed to find some graphic assets which you can check out for the following:
A glitch fixed edition, and what is the very final edition of the game has been recovered and added to the rest of the Nuker versions that have been recovered previously
Firstly, a new Flimbo’s Quest V1 entry has been added with a slightly different title screen, game movement and sfx. Also the proper C64 files for the Flimbos Quest 2 tunes have been added.
Part of our digital preservation work with Ashley Routledge’s disks, has been to find any unreleased demos or graphics by the duo. This page gives an overview of what has been found so far, which you can download for yourself.
As a larger part of general preservation work over a series of collections, we have extracted a number of lost music, Compunet demos, graphics and other pieces of interest – which are not really GTW material, but things you may find interesting.
Ashley Routledge recently in 2015 loaned his C64 disks for GTW64 to do a large preservation job. Mostly to try and see if we could recover Daffy Duck, but also to preserve any potentially lost demos, artwork and just Ash’s work in general before the disks deteriorated. A massive thank you to Ashley Routledge allowing us to preserve his disks with the hope that we could find some lost works by the famous duo.
It’s been a very busy few months, doing a lot of digital preservation work for ex-C64 developers and artists – but a very fruitful few months too. Very often, we find music files and demos which are not online anywhere and which get passed on to the relevant sources to make sure they are made available.
Ok, so we’re not talking about a majorly different conversion that was in the works, but some fairly significant differences compared to the final edition that eventually ended up on the C64.
Many of you may remember the rolling demo of Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge on the C64 and being wowed by it. Did you spot the differences between that and the final version? No? Well, here we go…
The Commodore Format demo from Power Pack 4
Of course, very often when a preview is released – there can still be some significant amount of work left to do or changes which are requested. Seems like Lotus was no different, and there were some visible changes made just before release.
The final release
Firstly, there are two cosmetic changes which stand out. One where the score panel has been improved and bulked out a little – nothing too special. The other is significantly the removal of the red and white road banding that appears at the side. It’s a shame, as it looks great in the demo – but we are guessing that it was removed to compensate for speed – which does seem a lot quicker in the final release.
There also is the inclusion of a white counter in the top right corner of both screens, but the final different is a bit more subtle…
If you check the top cars in both of the above screenshots, you’ll notice that the demo features an extra frame of animation where the car turns inwards more. It’s been cut out for some reason on the final game, which we’re not entirely sure why. Maybe it was to squeeze more road objects into the game?
Looking into the game a bit more – it seems that the cars were entirely drawn via character blocks in the demo version, with the red/white bands being handled by expanded sprites which were overlaid onto the sides of the road. When the banding was dropped in the final game, it seems those sprite frames were replaced by the main car in its largest state – with the smaller state (where the car is in the distance) handled by characters still.
In early 2016, this was spotted in an old issue of Zzap 64 …
Sadly no colour screenshot, but here you can see the status panels being different yet again, a familiar red/white road effect (using expanded sprites like in the rolling demo), but it seems very different looking cars and darker shading effects on the mountains in the distance. There may not have been any raster bars either at this point – so a very early version!
But then here is a colour shot thanks to Martin/Stadium 64! …
And to conclude, here are some more images relating to the earlier edition and the programmer. Click each to view full version.
And to complete a hat trick – here is a commercial SEUCK title from 1988 that was due for release by Video Images, but never made it due to a design bug which made it unplayable in places. Who fancies fixing it? ;-)
DISCLAIMER: We are a non-profit digitisation project, aiming to digitally preserve software and history which would otherwise be lost for good. If for any reason there is anything that you do not wish to be on the website, please contact us for removal.
Games That Weren't® is the registered trademark of Frank Gasking.
