Preserving Cancelled & Unreleased Video Game History Since 1999
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.
First update of 2012, and yet more unreleased goodies for you thanks to Ruben Spaans and Jazzcat, as well as other quick new entries:
Over the past few months, GTW64 has been working with C64.com to preserve a series of games after working on the disk collection of Darren Melbourne. 25 or so disks were painstakingly preserved by C64.com, and GTW64 trawled through these and found many a lost game. We present a good selection of these, but more will follow in the future with more disks being examined and preserved by both of us.
The collaborated update includes:
Then part of GTW64’s usual update includes:
Enjoy, and hope you all have a good holidays and a happy new year! We’ll be back in 2012 with more joint findings :)
Some of you will recall the awesome Spellcast game on the Commodore 64 that never was – the game by the excellent Genesis Software, which featured brilliant artwork by Jonathan Temples.
Well, after a break of around 20 years, Jonathan has got back into game art by designing for a new iPad game called DestructANT (Which ironically features Ants, just like Nobby The Aardvark). It’s great to see Jon’s brilliant work once more on a medium on which Jon produced many a great game on which I enjoyed as a 9/10yr old back then.
If you want to check out Jonathan’s work, check out the App store as the game is now released or the website at www.infuriousrepublic.com
Mark Campbell, webmaster of the Konix Multisystem archive, has informed Games That Weren’t that at long last a game has been recovered for the Konix Multisystem. It has been many long years of trying to find remains of development from the system, so this is a huge breakthrough!
The game is a long lost conversion of Robocod, ported from the Amiga – of which you can see a picture of some of the assets below. Developer Neil Beresford recently came forward after a request was made to try and get some source code to build a working Konix Multisystem emulator.
But what are these black box photos further down you ask? … Well, something else worth mentioning I guess ( ;) ) is the fact that another developer has found their Konix development system (The first which has been found so far). We are unsure at present if it works, and at the moment it is hoped that far more info will be found out about the machine as a whole and more of its internals. It hopefully will aid development of the emulator.
Excellent news so far, and it is hoped that we may see Robocod on the Konix Multisystem running by Christmas time – which is fitting considering the theme of the game. We also hope to add a few more assets here over time, so watch this space!
A new update from Games That Weren’t, including:
20 new entries added
Civilization, Dive Bomber, Dinnamic Donkey Duo, Erik the Destroyer, Elusive, Giana Strikes Back, Game#3, Gyrofalcon, Imperial Bodyguard, Pimple Panic, Robin Hood, Shian: “Tiger Style”, Shian: “Wu Dang”, Samba 2, SAW Wars, Unnamed game 1, Unnamed Football game, Unnamed game 2, Unnamed game 3, Zach Townsend Puzzler
8 game entries updated
Car Wars, Messiah 3, Quonodam, Shockwave, Trojahn, Thundercats V1, The Legend of Kyril
Recently in 2011 saw the re-launch of the Bad Taste label by Keith Wood in preparation for a upcoming article in Retro Gamer magazine on Dis Baby.
Coming from events of producing the article and interest from the Bad Taste range of games, Keith has decided that the first game from the Bad Taste label will be a proper version of Seal Cull (Released on the PC platform). Seal Cull was a game that never was for the C64 back in the 80s. It was believed that it was a Bad Taste game, but Keith confirmed that this wasnt the case. However, Keith loved the idea so much that he has decided to create the game. Keith has been busily working away with his family members to get the game complete and ready hopefully by November.
Keith is now wanting to open the game up for Beta testing, and needs help. For more details on getting involved, please go to:
I’ve just seen this message from Gilby on World of Spectrum regarding the recently discovered discs:
To date, the Spectrum Mega Twins disc has been successfully dumped, plus two Amstrad discs with Mega Twins on it… There are other proto discs that have been recovered, but progress is very very slow. Mega Twins is in a fairly playable form, although not complete. There are some graphics glitches with the scrolling and some placeholder graphics are in place rather than finished artwork… Also it appears some collision detection is not in place.. I´d say the game is about 95% complete give or take.
This seems to tally with the CPC screenshots on from Amstrad Computer User featured. 95% sounds promising, lets hope we get to have a go soon.
A long lost and unreleased version of Indy Heat has been packaged up and released, but only 50 limited edition copies will be available. So if you want to grab a copy, then check out the Atari Age forums for more details.
News source: Retro Fusion (Direct news link)
Within only a week we have covered our hosting costs thanks to fantastic contributions from Brandon Cobb, Vinny Mainolfi and Jan Schulze. Thanks guys, your contributions were very humbling and helps keep things ticking over for us.
As a result we have taken the donation options off line until next year.
Thanks again!
Games That Weren’t team
Very occasionally in the pursuit of a GTW you stumble upon other, previously unknown GTWs by happenstance.
This happened to me recently as part of my ongoing investigation into the possibility of an Alien Trilogy port on the Sega 32X.
I was engaged in an email conversation with Keith Burkhill, who worked on Alien Trilogy for the Sega Saturn. Sadly he didnt know anything about a possible 32X port at the time but he did mention another game he worked on that was sadly cancelled.
It was a conversion of Psygnosis popular formula one racing game, F1, which was released for the PC and Playstation. At the time the Saturn had released F1 Challenge that sold poorly and provided only a very basic F1 experience. Psygnosis F1 on the other hand included the full 1995 season (despite being released in 1996) and was one of the top selling games of 1996, cementing the Playstations advantage over the failing Saturn.
The Saturn port was to be based on the existing Playstation version and according to Keith the game development had gotten so far as to get it running as a wire frame, which meant there were no textures. Sadly the game was then cancelled as by this time the Saturn market had died out.
Its addition to the Saturn game library would have been welcome indeed but perhaps the lag between the year in which F1 was based and the year it would have come out in on the Saturn contributed to a feeling that its time had passed, however its quite possible that the in-game stats would have been updated to showcase the current racing season.
Ive looked online for any reference to this planned conversion but cannot find any, hence the cheeky exclusive tag I slapped on the headline.
Hopefully something will turn up one day but in the meantime enjoy this video of the game playing on a Playstation and wonder at what might have been!
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.
