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 since 1999.
Please Browse our archive and discover the many entries that we host for many different platforms.
Following on from the exciting launch of the Konix Multi-system emulator and a runnable preview of AMC’89, the guys from the Slipstream: The Konix Multi-system archive have now released the sources which can be grabbed from here:
This has been released with the permission of Jeff Minter himself, and it is hoped that someone will pick up the baton and look to try and complete the game, maybe even trying to reconstruct the Stonehenge levels which are missing from the preview.
First of 2013 – whilst browsing through Drax’s work tunes, I spotted a few sets of tunes which were obviously meant for some games that never quite made it. Here are the very quick entries to start with – hoping to have more information very soon to elaborate more on them:
And also David Wightman helped us to confirm some more details on two games he was involved in which we had entries already in the archive, confirming credits and details to why the games never made it:
RatPack led us to a sad discovery that ex-C64 developer Carl Wade passed away in 2011 at the young age of 40. Carl was famous for the C64 conversions of Double Dragon (Ocean), Gemini Wing and Stratego. Rest in piece Carl!
Well, ever since the upgrade of GTW64 was completed – it was straight onto preparing for the Christmas update. No rest for the wicked. Hopefully we won’t disappoint with some big findings to keep you going. Lets kick things off:
Otherworld full game
Our big finding for this update is a long lost full game from Andrew Morris (graphic artist for Kikstart 2 amongst many others) which we have salvaged from Andrew’s work disks. This is a very cool Thing on a Spring’esq game which unfortunately didn’t quite make the budget labels of the day. A huge thanks to Jani Tahvanainen for helping recover the game and also fixing things up as a completable game.
After many months of development and the recent discovery of the remains of AMC’89, the Konix Emulator has finally been completed and the first public version made available.
It is a monumental release of an emulator for a console that never was. After years of research and digging, this has been made possible thanks to Mark Campbell’s dedicated hard work and belief that its remains could be recovered and preserved.
Of course, the highlight of the emulator is the inclusion of a compiled version of Attack Of The Mutant Camels 1989 – a game we never thought we’d ever get chance to play. Now we can play an early version. In addition to this, Mark tells me that Jeff has given permission for the source code to be released as well – so there is potential of the game being finished or even ported to other platforms. Exciting times!
I can’t really add this to GTW64 as a proper entry, but I thought i’d share – as i’m pretty happy at this particular personal finding.
After doing some preservation work with the Maverick v5 tool on a problematic disk, and with some big success (as you will find out about in good time!), I wondered if it would work on one of my old work disks which contained a SEUCK 1942 clone that I had quickly done in a day and had abandoned at an early stage.
Just a very quick post to share a few pre-release versions of Hawkeye and Armalyte. Nothing to get too excited about, and the Hawkeye version has already been put out last year – just slightly under the radar. The purpose of this post is merely to highlight them and make them available. Here they are to download.
The Hawkeye bits seem to be review copies, and also a slightly pre-release version which has a distinct difference of a grey main character on the title screen – but Jeroen Tel tunes with slightly differing instrument sounds. The in-game tune in particular sounds quite different on one of the disks. Unfortunately one demo does not load at all, and the final verison seems to be what was sent out to magazines (with no real differences).
Armalyte is additionally interesting, as one version has no title screen at all – but some cool circle effects and option to select players. There may be some slightly different sprites used, but that is all.
Another disk has the option to select from 4 levels – only one seems to load in correctly though, and has some odd sound effects in places.
After Jeff Minter recently confirmed at Manchester’s PLAY expo that AMC’89 was long lost from his source disks, it seemed that all was lost.
I had even mentioned the conversation to Mark Cambell (web admin for the brilliant Konix archive), and we said that we may have to rely on a complete fluke of it turning up. And a fluke just a few weeks later was what happened!
Well, just after our conversation – Version 0.4 of the game’s source (an early build with just the Egyptian graphics) was found within a batch of test disks that had been passed on. The news directly from the Konix site can be found here. It is an amazing finding, and what is even more amazing is the fact that it has been got running within the Konix emulator already – which has only recently just been coded up. Check out the YouTube video below.
It is brilliant news that something of the game has been found, and even more chuffed with the finding is Jeff himself – who had thought the game was lost forever. The old video clips that were recovered from VHS clips were once taunting images of a game that we were desperate to play and hear those fractal generated sounds properly for the first time. Now we are able to – and it is thanks of course to the fantastic work of Mark Campbell!
We’re not sure what the next steps are – but Jeff has given permission for the game to be released – maybe he might even finish it in some shape or form! Once things are tidied up, the plan will be to release it with the emulator.
Although there is little to actually play – because the source has been found, levels could be build for it. Possibly the missing bits re-implemented from the old videos as source. Many possibilities, we’ll see how it all pans out.
After many years of saying we were going to update GTW64, it has finally been done! We are very proud to present the newly updated GTW64 site, now becoming part of the main Games That Weren’t website and taking advantages of its features – including the ability to rate entries, comment, view latest update feeds and more. Additionally there have been improvements to searching and discovery with various canned searches set up throughout on key attributes like company and year.
No doubt there will be a few niggles here and there, but we hope to have caught most of the problems. If you do spot anything badly broken, please let us know and we’ll aim to fix as soon as possible. It is hoped that this upgrade will provide a mechanism to carry out quicker updates and on the fly updates as well (i.e. publish updated notes as soon as we get them). We’ll see – but any time saved will with any luck give us more time to locate more unreleased C64 software.
We are additionally retiring the gtw64.co.uk domain, and it will merely act as a redirect to the new address from now on. If anything has linked to any old GTW64 pages/urls, then we are hoping that most should be redirecting to the new addresses here. If you are linking to the old address, please could you update your bookmarks and links accordingly!
Not much else left to say apart from that we hope you enjoy the new site!
The game had surfaced previously in 2009, and then things went quiet as the quest went on for the elusive dump of the rom. Now there is a big opportunity to get hold of the game and finally preserve it for all to see. Only problem is that you’ll need at least £800 to get it.
It is hoped that if anyone manages to get hold of the game, they will be right away attempting to back everything up and release to the community. So often are these types of auctions picked up by collectors and never see the light of day again.
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.
