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.
Dragons Lair was a technical marvel in the early 80s with its impressive Laser Disc technology. Elite jumped on the bandwagon with their licence of the popular cartoon series.
Whereas Dragons Lair was heavily changed for its home conversions, Elite decided to go one better. Originally starting out as a text only adventure, the plan for Scooby Doo grew to include pictures and finally extra interactivity to turn it into an 8-bit laser disc game.
Lunar Jetman was part of a huge classic genre on the Spectrum that spawned a few games by Ultimate featuring the Jetman character. The range of games however never quite made their way onto the C64. Spectrum users had Jetman, whereas C64 users had to make do with Sir Arthur Pendragon in a series of games.
A big thanks to Paul Drury for flagging this up for GTW after a recent Retro Gamer magazine article with Larry DeMar.
After Vid Kidz had delivered Stargate to Williams, Larry had begun working on a new project called “Conquest”
Larry recalls: I didnt get very far as Robotron got so interesting, so quickly, I jumped off Conquest to join Eugene on that. You were a ship roughly in the centre of a screen of a 2D universe. It played with controls like Omega Race; you had a wheel for your rotation and then thrust and fire. It was quite elegant and had a scanner for the space but then we heard Sinistar was in development, so we put it to one side and never finished it. If wed concentrated on it, we probably wouldve beaten Sinistar to market by a year.
Larry kept the source code and Retro Gamer originally printed some exclusive screenshots from this intriguing lost title. Paul has passed higher quality shots from the article which you can check out below in our gallery.
Larry additionally had to add: “The ship that we created for this prototype (which would have been replaced) was an homage to the ship from Computer Space.
The Red and Yellow globs on the upper right are the players shots which were animated fireballs. The circles is the explosion of a planet which is in progress. This program which generated these circular explosions was the same one we later used to create the Time Tunnel in Blaster. There was very little game here. At this point I had created the 2-D scrolling world, the ship control, the scanner, the ship’s fireball shots, the collision detection and explosions and enemy tracking for end of wave. At this point we learned about Williams Sinistar project and put it on the shelf.”
Many thanks to Paul Drury for the information, and Larry DeMar for originally talking to Paul and sharing information on his long lost game.
Designed as the sequel to the highly thought of Star Fleet, Star Fleet II was aimed at being bigger, better and more complex than its already complex predecessor. Both were war simulation games where you controlled ships and armies, in the first game with the aim of defending Earth from aliens and in Star Fleet II you played as the aliens, intent of conquering planets throughout the universe.
What is it with fantasy games from the 1980s and the letter Z? So many characters, particularly in American fantasy (so it seemed to me) start with the letter Z. The wizard from the American version of Heroquest was called Zargon (The UK version had Morcar, which is much better!); Beastmaster had King Zed and lets not forget the many trips made to Zork. The UK chipped in with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain being called Zagor and at least one other effort, Zorakk the Conqueror, which was released on the BBC Electron and CPC but not on the Spectrum or C64. Continue reading →
Pirates of the Ocean was one of four games slated for release by Kele Line in 1987, alongside Force of the Vulcan, that never made it to release. The only two games they released in 1987 were Tiger Mission and The Vikings, which were to be their last released before going bankrupt in the same year. Continue reading →
Pegasus had its beginnings in the basement of a kebab shop in Gravesend in Kent, where Chris Neary, who had done the graphics for The Evil Dead in 1983, along with Duncan Rigden and Stuart Brown, got together to make the best game ever. Continue reading →
For a more detailed analysis of Triffid Software Research and the Runemagic Adventure Series, read the entry for The Secret River. A quick summary is that a series of eight adventures were planned, the first two of which, The Secret River and The Wizards Citadel, were released on the BBC Micro and had planned releases for the Spectrum 48k, the Commodore 64 and the BBC Electron. However, none seem to have been released for unknown reasons. Continue reading →
When it comes to RPGs one of the obstacles computer games have always had to overcome is how to proficiently transfer the unlimited experience of playing a pen and paper RPG, such as Dungeons and Dragons, to a computer, especially in the early days when you were limited to 32k, 48k, 64k and so on. Continue reading →
Dungeons and Dragons was a gaming phenomona that started in the 1970s when historial gaming enthusiasts, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, created their own rules to tabletop battlefield gaming and focused it on a small group of heroes sneaking into a castle.
The game proved popular and to this day remains a huge influence on popular culture, though few people realise it. All modern computer games owe something to Dungeons & Dragons. Any game with even a casual structure that involves hit points, experience or levelling, in fact owes it’s existence to the original RPG game that introduced these concepts.
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Games That Weren't® is the registered trademark of Frank Gasking.
Dragons Lair was a technical marvel in the early 80s with its impressive Laser Disc technology. Elite jumped on the bandwagon with their licence of the popular cartoon series.
