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Wednesday, October 15, 2025

Tales and sprites of the Video games That Weren’t


Video games That Weren’t is a weblog about unreleased and cancelled video video games, that includes media and mysteries uncovered from previous paperwork, magazines and interviews with the individuals who had been there. There’s a ebook too, a thick and laborious one at that.

Video games That Weren’t was first impressed by a Commodore 64 journal article by Ian Osborne in a late difficulty of Commodore Power in 1993. Entitled, That Was the Recreation That Wasn’t“, the function was of nice curiosity to a younger 11yr previous Frank Gasking, and make clear titles that had by no means been launched.

Frank puzzled what it could be like to really play a few of these video games that had been proven and started contacting buddies within the C64 scene to try to decide up copies of these video games talked about within the article. After managing to get maintain of some of them that had leaked out, Frank researched by way of many aged magazines and began to uncover much more unreleased / incomplete video games.

There are the well-known examples, equivalent to Bandersnatch/Psyclapse, however many others I might by no means heard of. I significantly loved studying about the wild misuse of the Thundercats license by UK recreation writer Think about, which set about growing two titles with the instant-crush methodology attribute of UK-based licensees within the Nineteen Eighties, ran out of time earlier than Christmas anyway, so crudely reskinned a completed recreation that had nothing to do with the cat cartoon. This was all the time thought to have been a recreation referred to as Sword of the Samurai, (to not be confused with the Microprose title by that title) but it surely seems to have been one thing referred to as Wolf.

It’s doubtless that Wolf was near completion by round September/October time, Elite noticed the sport and noticed it was a perfect alternative to re-purpose as a Thundercats themed recreation. Gargoyle little question had a monetary motive to go go forward and make the related modifications. One factor that didn’t change although was the music – which Rob [Hubbard] had already composed again in July 1987. This now explains why the tunes don’t have any resemblance in any respect to the TV collection. Tunes had been already composed, they had been Rob Hubbard tunes and Elite had no cause to get Rob to re-compose them. When this idea was posed to Rob, Rob confirmed that truly Wolf WAS Thundercats, and when he was contracted to do the ST music – he was made conscious of the title change and requested to do a ST model of Wolf in a rush earlier than we went to the states.

Curiously there may very well be fairly a number of remnants of Wolf within the recreation, which make sense now we have now the connection. The mountain areas on the high of the display screen appear to have indication that there may have been some form of “moonlight” function initially – which can have impacted on the sport. Perhaps you initially managed a human, which may remodel right into a Wolf underneath moonlight? We checked the CVG preview for any stays, and there have been sprites that by no means made it into the ultimate recreation – which we have now added right here. The CVG preview additionally has barely totally different SFX too. May these have initially been for Wolf?

The 2 different initiatives weren’t deserted. One was launched the next yr as Past the Ice Citadel, the opposite as Bomb Jack II. How slapdash had been these publishers? “Bomb Jack II” nonetheless had the Thundercats theme in it—which they hadn’t put within the “Thundercats” recreation they really revealed.



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