3 new entries added

Cadaver, Megahirn, Protector

11 lost/missing titles located

Following on from the 15 Grolier / Mindflight titles last month and thanks to Nicol Walder, 11 more previous lost/missing titles for a few of our pages, and also a few missing from Gamebase have been added to the site.

11 lost/missing C64 titles

Scooby Doo and Scrappy Doo prototype added

Just the other day we also added a Scooby Doo and Scrappy Doo pre-release build.

Scooby Doo and Scrappy Doo Prototype

12 updates added

Defensive, Escape From Colditz, Heroquest Expansion Pack 2, Mindbend, Murder!, Picnic Paranoia, Raid on Romaro , Stack Light Rifle games, Star Force Seven, Transforming Overland Robot, Tronix 2, Vengeance Of Zeno

Among the games located are the missing Orbyte Software titles French, Italian and Spanish, along with Rats & Cats and an incomplete copy of Escape from Alcatraz from our Stack Light Rifle Games searches. Nicol has also located Inferential Anne 1 and Inferential Anne 3, neither of which currently seems to be present within GameBase64 or on our Micrograms page, as well as Mind Prober and Poker Party from our Dynacomp catalogue searches.

Finally, Nicol has found a copy of Battaglia Navale, although it doesn’t seem to be the same missing game referenced within our Zzap! Italia entry and is a hack of Elite’s Battleships. Included anyway for posterity.

We’ll be updating the relevant GTW pages with the findings where appropriate.

Watris

One title that doesn’t currently seem to appear within the usual C64 archives is Watris, a simple Tetris-style game written in BASIC by Thobias Rohde.

The game initially produces a SYNTAX ERROR IN 180, but pressing Return and running it again with RUN: gets things going. It’s a very simple production, but worth preserving and documenting nonetheless.

With a huge thank you to Nicol Walder for digging out and finding the games from various disk collections.

Download

• September2026-C64-findings

John Hardie very kindly got in touch with GTW after going through an old floppy disk that he had obtained from Atari many years ago. To his surprise, the disk contained the original FlexiCAD vector drawings for the proposed Jaguar/CD combination unit.

Atari’s redesigned system was intended to combine the standard Jaguar hardware and Jaguar CD into a single unit, rather than requiring the familiar CD add-on which sits on top of the original console. The combination model never made it to market, although photographs of prototype hardware have surfaced over the years and the system was reportedly shown behind closed doors at E3.

John has now uncovered the original vector drawings showing the design from a number of different angles. As the files require suitable CAD software to view, John loaded them into an AutoCAD viewer and produced the images that you can see below.

It’s a fantastic little piece of Atari hardware development history to unexpectedly surface from an old floppy after all these years, and we’re very pleased to help document it within the GTW archive.

With a huge thank you to John Hardie for getting in touch, preserving the original files and allowing us to share the images here and the DXF files for download.

Download

• rejagcdcombounit

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This seems to be a test build of one of the levels which may have been sent to the publisher to show progress back in the day, or to a magazine for preview screenshots. There is currently no sound implemented, no cut scenes and there could be minor differences compared to the final release (especially last minute bugs). If you spot anything majorly different, please let us know and we’ll update the page.

It’s a nice early glimpse at the game taking shape of a game which I had a lot of fun with back in the day, and not too far from completion it seems with most of the core engine in place. You can read more about the completed game here.

With thanks to Ashley Routledge and Dave Saunders for allowing access to their archives.

Download

• ScrappyDooPreview(C64)

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Platforms: PC, Sony PlayStation

MELT was an ambitious Iron Maiden game developed by London’s Virtual Studios during the mid-1990s, with Eddie taking on the role of the game’s villain. Announced alongside Iron Maiden’s Best of the Beast campaign, it promised a fully 3D adventure through time and space, with the player hunting down Eddie’s scattered energy Pods before ultimately facing him in Hyperspace.

Although the game was heavily promoted and appears to have come surprisingly close to completion, Virtual Studios collapsed in 1997 and MELT was never released. For years, the game was known mainly through screenshots, promotional material and a brief appearance on GamesMaster.

That changed in September 2026, when Games That Weren’t was anonymously supplied with a surviving PC build, the original source code, an updated version of the source with modern fixes, and further development material.

Before getting into the recovery, we first need to highlight the excellent research carried out by Tamaracade in her 2023 video, Melt: The Lost Iron Maiden Game. Her investigation brought together the surviving Virtual Studios and Iron Maiden websites, magazine coverage and other material to build a picture of a game which had almost completely disappeared from view. Her work also uncovered important details around the game’s intended design, changing publishing arrangements and eventual cancellation, providing an invaluable starting point for our own research for this entry.

We then wanted to learn more directly from someone who had actually worked on the project, so we approached Paul Tebbutt, who was Lead Software Engineer at Virtual Studios and worked on the PC version of MELT. Paul was not involved with the recent recovery, but very kindly agreed to talk through his memories of the game and the company.

Iron Maiden had been promoting MELT during 1996, with the game appearing in connection with their Best of the Beast album. The archived Virtual Studios website described it as a “3D adventure game” featuring Eddie, with versions planned for Windows 95 and Sony PlayStation. The premise was extravagant: Eddie’s powers had been scattered into eleven capsules or Pods throughout time, and the player had to find and destroy them before Eddie could regain his strength.

Promotional material promised 15 worlds spanning two million years, taking the player from prehistoric environments and Ancient Egypt to Stonehenge, the Titanic and futuristic locations such as Vega and Aldebaran. The final battle was to take place in Hyperspace. There were also some ambitious claims about the way the game would work. The official site described non-sequential progression, randomly placed Pods, intelligent enemies and a system that could adapt the game to different playing times.

When we asked Paul how much of this he remembered, he was sceptical. “Sounds like marketing speak to me,” he laughed. “I think the Pods probably generated in different places each time you played. As I remember it, there was all the levels, like 14 or something. And the idea was you had to progress through each of them, lots of shooting, baddies in each level. And then I think you had to collect like an orb or something in each one… which was supposed to be part of Eddie. One of the things at the end, you’d get Eddie in Hyperspace and have to kill him there.”

Life at Virtual Studios and building the game

Virtual Studios had originated in virtual reality before moving into games, and its old website tells us they were based in Barnes, South West London. The company had Silicon Graphics workstations, a 24-track recording studio, video facilities and a network of PCs and Sony development hardware. Paul remembers the place with plenty of affection.

“Virtual Studios was a great place. I loved it,” he began. “I really enjoyed working there. The people were all fantastic. It was a really nice mix of people. It was in the Mortlake/Barnes area, right on the river, old building called The Limes, backs right onto the Thames. We were in the basement… You walked in, there’s like the office on one side, kitchen over there, full 24-track music studio next door.”

The programmers eventually worked from the top of the old fire station next door, while the artists occupied the more impressive graphics area. Paul describes one section as having four Silicon Graphics workstations in a darkened room. “It looked like the bridge of the Star Trek Enterprise,” he smiled.

Paul initially joined as one of the programmers working on MELT, alongside Gary Catto, Ben and Peter “Darkside” Gartside. Chris Wylie was responsible for the PC technology. “Pete was doing the PlayStation version,” recalled Paul. “Ben was on collision engine. Gary and myself were doing the game. Chris was building the DirectX PC engine.”

The PC version wasn’t simply a direct port of the PlayStation game. The two versions were separate technical projects, with the PlayStation work largely falling to Peter. “It was all piled on Pete,” Paul recalled. “It was set up to fail, really. I don’t think Chris was interested in doing the PlayStation code and all its limitations.”

Sadly, Peter Gartside passed away in 2020, and at present no build of the PlayStation development is known to have survived.

One of Paul’s early tasks on MELT was to create a Binary Space Partitioning tool, which could process scenes and build BSP trees to help with more efficient rendering. “I’d learned about it and built the tool to do it,” he recalled. Interestingly, Paul isn’t certain that BSP rendering was ultimately used within MELT itself, suggesting that this particular piece of early development work may not have made it into the later engine.

As development progressed, another problem became increasingly important: making the game’s weapons actually hit the characters.

“As we’re coming to the end of the game, we had nothing to say that the bullets hit the player or the enemy or anything like that. They’re just going through the models. So I had to build some collision detection,” recalled Paul. “I had to build it quick and I had to make it fast. So I got my little Ladybird book of maths, which had been my crib sheet for A level, and modelled everything as a sphere, a cylinder or a rectangle. And then did a bunch of maths, guys are like, if we say this, we can say this angle is effectively 0 and this value goes to infinity. So that term’s 0 and all these little tricks. And I applied as many of those as I could to make the calculations quick and simple. And it kind of worked. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but yeah, I’m pretty proud of that.”

MELT was also being developed during an especially interesting point in PC history, as 3D accelerator hardware began appearing at an incredible rate. The archived MELT FAQ advertised compatibility with DirectX and Direct3D, including support for 3Dfx, PowerVR, Rendition and other hardware. The game was also intended to run in software on sufficiently powerful Windows 95 machines.

Paul remembers the hardware race creating plenty of headaches. “It was a time when everyone was producing new graphics cards. So 3DFX was the best one. We used to get their latest graphics cards. Obviously it was a new technology. Always difficult getting the drivers working, you try a new graphics card, there’d be loads of flicker or the text just wouldn’t work properly, all that kind of stuff.”

Virtual Studios also had links with Microsoft around DirectX and Direct3D, giving the company access to hardware and technology at a time when 3D acceleration was still developing rapidly.

Audio was another key area being worked on, with Eamon Flynn brought in specifically to handle sound for the games. “We got Eamon in as just a direct audio guy on the games. And he was very good. Put a lot of stuff together,” recalled Paul. “I asked him for a “Countdown” sound. I remember putting one of those together in the game at one point.”

Paul refers to the distinctive clock music from Channel 4’s Countdown, with the team creating their own take on the familiar sequence for use somewhere within MELT. Exactly where it was intended to appear isn’t currently clear, but after our interview Paul went looking through the recovered files and discovered it still present as TIMER.MID.

So, somewhere within the surviving MELT development there should be a rather unexpected nod to Countdown waiting to be heard. Whether it can be triggered during normal gameplay, or was ultimately left unused, is something we’ll hopefully be able to establish as the recovered game and source code are explored further.

The worlds of MELT

The surviving documentation for MELT suggests a game which was intended to be much more than a straightforward shooter. The archived MELT website described players travelling freely through 15 different worlds, with the game designed around changing routes, different time periods and varying game durations. The player could move between worlds in different orders, seek out Eddie’s Pods and eventually enter Hyperspace for a final confrontation.

Paul can still remember a surprising number of the environments that were being developed. “I remember Aldebaran because of the caves, which was an interesting part for the collision detection. And I remember the Titanic as well. There was an underwater and there was Vega and Stonehenge. Oh God, yes, the trilobites.”

The game’s art was also an important part of its identity, with Virtual Studios promoting fully rendered 3D characters and environments. The original website described its character technology as part of the company’s own Advanced Character Animation System, while Iron Maiden’s music was also intended to feature in the game to polish it all off.

The original plan was for MELT to be released in November 1996, but that date came and went. An official Iron Maiden website update on 26 November 1996 announced that technical problems had delayed the game until March 1997. Further coverage continued to report a planned spring 1997 release. Tamaracade’s research also uncovered a confusing sequence of publishers associated with the game, with American Softworks, Castle Multimedia and later Maxiam all appearing in various material.

Despite all of those delays, Paul remembers the PC version getting extremely close to completion. “As far as we were concerned, we were still working on it, trying to get it out the door,” he recalled. “It was getting very close. I mean, I still think the game was probably fundamentally flawed in its design and that it wouldn’t be a good game. But I remember I was down to sort of one page of bugs on my A4 notepad.”

Asked how much longer the team might have needed, Paul estimated perhaps another month or two. It means that MELT wasn’t abandoned as a rough concept. A substantial amount of work had gone into creating the worlds, systems and presentation before everything suddenly came to an end. It seems the PC version wasn’t far from being finished.

Looking back, Paul is critical of the overall design. “There were good people working on it. It’s just, it didn’t really pull together as a game. It was like a lot of set pieces,” he reflected. “The levels were okay, they were nice, good design, they were interesting graphics, nice variety from planets to Stonehenge to underwater, all that kind of stuff. But yeah, it lacked the polish and anything to really pull it together to make it a great game.”

Collapse and cancellation

The relationship between MELT’s cancellation and the collapse of Virtual Studios has been confused over the years. Tamaracade’s research uncovered an Iron Maiden announcement confirming that MELT had been scrapped, but Paul’s own recollection gives us a more direct view of what happened inside the development team.

On 3 May 1997, one of the artists called Paul to tell him that the receivers had arrived. Until that moment, the development team had still been working on the game. “I woke up on the day after New Labour got in, on 3rd May ’97, with Daina, one of the artists, calling me up. ‘Paul, yeah, the receivers are here. I think you better come in.’ I was still at home because I was doing some weird sort of two days in the office and then go home and rest, and then come back and do another overnighter. So we were all still working on it, trying to get it out the door.”

Paul headed into Virtual Studios, where things became rather tense. “I do remember I made a silly joke about, ‘Oh, I’ll delete all the source code then.’ That was stupid. Someone overheard that and I was escorted into another machine where I had to prove that I hadn’t dabbled with the source code and give them the backup.”

Iron Maiden would not publicly confirm the game’s fate until September 1997. On 18 September, the band’s official website announced that the original MELT had been scrapped and that work had moved to a new game that would eventually become Ed Hunter. The announcement included Blaze Bayley’s blunt assessment of the cancelled title: “It was crap.”.  When we mentioned the quote to Paul, he didn’t exactly disagree, describing the assessment as “entirely fair”.

There was, however, one final attempt to see whether MELT could be completed. Following the collapse of Virtual Studios, Paul recalls that members of the development team were called to a meeting with Sanctuary, who were involved with Iron Maiden at the time. “They brought us in, we had this big board table meeting with a few devs and a few artists and just the core team across the board from Sanctuary bosses plus a lot of accountants and finance people as well. And they were basically saying, look, how much do we have to pay you for you to finish it off?”

By this stage, the developers had seemingly had enough of it all. “We said, ‘Oh yeah, 100 grand each, that will do it,'” Paul recalled. “The owners looked to the finance guys and they nodded and said, no. So it was quite a short meeting and we didn’t find common ground.”

That was essentially the end of MELT.

The recovery

For almost three decades, the game itself remained elusive. There were screenshots, promotional images, a surviving introduction and television footage, but no known public PC build that could be properly explored. That has now changed. In September 2026, Games That Weren’t was anonymously supplied with a surviving PC build of MELT and its source code. We are hugely grateful that they chose to bring it forward for preservation and allow us to share it.

The material supplied to us includes an original archive of the MELT source code, a separate version containing modern compatibility fixes, and a runnable PC build.

We have also been able to confirm that the surviving PC build contains considerably more than the few fragments previously seen online. Pretty much all the levels seem to be present, giving a perfect glimpse of what Virtual Studios had built by the end and just how close it was to release. Hopefully the source will also allow others to investigate MELT much more deeply, identify unfinished features and perhaps uncover material that remains hidden and unused within the surviving data.

It does though seem to be a version from before the Gamesmaster review – which featured an animated sequence with Eddie at the start. This is missing, apart from a static screenshot at the beginning when you run the game. It means that there could be more to recover in the future.

The downloads also include a number of useful extras to help explore what survives. A new launcher allows the game to be run with different rendering and display options, including hardware rendering, windowed mode, different fog settings and adjustable frame-rate limits. The latter means it can either be played at a modern 60fps or closer to its original 1997 pace of around 25-30fps. Options are also present for the CD audio soundtrack, introduction and ending sequences and publisher logos.

Perhaps even more interesting from a preservation point of view are some of the tools and documentation included alongside the game. A complete set of top-down maps has been generated directly from the surviving level data, showing player starting positions, monsters, Pods, pickups and teleport locations. A separate bestiary documents the game’s creatures, including their models, textures and animation sequences, with Eddie himself represented as both the Try Your Luck opponent and Hyperspace boss. We’ve included these within the downloads below.

There is also a browser-based monster viewer which allows the surviving models to be examined with their animations, textures, wireframes, normals and original texture pages. Together, these additions provide a particularly useful way of digging through MELT’s assets and understanding just how much content was present when development came to an end.

The game also contains a number of surviving cheat codes, including commands for health, ammunition, weapons, keys, maps and Pods. Interestingly, GOD and TIME are recognised by the game but don’t actually do anything, with the accompanying notes indicating that they were never implemented back in 1997. You can find details of these within the readme file.

Longer term, there is still the possibility that further material could turn up. The PlayStation version, in particular, remains elusive and we hope that something can be saved, though our anonymous contributor suggests that development didn’t get anywhere as far as the PC edition.

Looking back, Paul remembers Virtual Studios with far more warmth than he remembers MELT itself. “Definitely the best company I’ve ever worked for,” he reflects. “I think everyone enjoyed it there. It wasn’t a long-term thing and it failed ultimately, but people had a good time on the journey.”

With a huge thank you to our Anonymous Source for preserving and allowing us to share the surviving MELT PC build and source code, to Paul Tebbutt for taking the time to talk to us and share his memories of the project and Virtual Studios and Christian Furr for help with contacts and information. A special thank you also goes to Tamaracade for the extensive research behind her 2023 Melt: The Lost Iron Maiden Game video, which provided an invaluable source of information when putting this entry together.

Downloads

• Maps
• Bestiary
• Melt_Playable
• Melt_original_source
• Melt_updated_source

Videos

GTW Gameplay video

Tamaracade’s video on Melt

Gamesmaster review video

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Platform: Atari 2600

“City by the Lake” is a very early Atari 2600 demonstration from Western Technologies, created as a technical showcase for what a newly established development team could achieve on Atari’s difficult-to-program console. The surviving material consists of a short looping animation showing a jet flying across a landscape while the reflection of a city shimmers in the water below. There is no player interaction or gameplay, but it provides a fascinating glimpse of early Atari 2600 development.

The demo was documented in the 2026 paper No Prototypical Prototypes: Prototypes as the Stone Tools of Game Development by Katie Biittner, Paul Allen Newell and John Aycock, which examines several unusual early development artifacts. The surviving code and imagery were provided by Paul Allen Newell, who was working at Western Technologies during this period. The paper explains that Western Technologies had to reverse engineer the Atari 2600 before it could properly pursue third-party development, with Mark Indictor and Paul involved in the company’s “Breaker” project. John Hall was hired for the project after this demonstration.

“City by the Lake” appears to have been created as part of that effort, helping demonstrate that Western Technologies had successfully worked out how to program the console. The surviving source identifies it as an “ATARI DEMO PROGRAM” and includes a note referring to an “ED & SEGA DEMONSTRATION AUGUST 12.” The paper identifies the programmer as Steve Morris, a summer intern at Western Technologies in 1981. Paul believes the “Ed” mentioned in the source may have been Ed Krakauer, chairman of GCE, although he stresses that he isn’t certain. The precise circumstances surrounding the demonstration therefore remain unclear.

There isn’t really anything to play here. The animation loops with the jet travelling across the screen and the water shimmering beneath it. That was the point of the demonstration, however, as the authors of the paper describe “City by the Lake” as an early development artifact intended to demonstrate the feasibility of the technology rather than evolve into a finished game. Paul has preserved the surviving material from his personal archives, and we can now share the animation along with the first page of the original source code, city3.asm. It may be tiny, but it represents an interesting piece of the early history of Atari 2600 development.

After the Atari project fell through, Western Technologies would move towards Vectrex development, with GCE and its chairman Ed Krakauer subsequently playing an important part in that transition.

For Games That Weren’t, this is a slightly unusual entry, as “City by the Lake” was never intended to become a commercial game. It is nevertheless an important piece of the Western Technologies story, representing an early demonstration of the technical work that opened the door to the company’s later games and other development projects.

With thanks to Paul Allen Newell for preserving and sharing the surviving material, and to Katie Biittner, John Aycock and Paul for documenting the artifact and its history in No Prototypical Prototypes.

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Platforms: Apple II, Macintosh

Fish! was a graphical text adventure from Magnetic Scrolls, released in 1988 across a wide range of formats including the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Amstrad PCW, ZX Spectrum +3, Archimedes and IBM PC. However, there remains some uncertainty surrounding the fate of planned Apple II and Macintosh editions.

The excellent Magnetic Scrolls Memorial lists both versions, but notes that circumstances surrounding the release of Fish! mean there is a possibility that neither version actually made it onto shop shelves.

Following our original post, former Telecomsoft/Rainbird games tester Richard Hewison very kindly got in touch with some further recollections from the time. Richard remembers being told around autumn/winter 1988 that commercially it was no longer considered worthwhile releasing further games for the Apple IIe.

Richard recalls testing the Apple IIe version of Magnetic Scrolls’ earlier Corruption, which was subsequently released, but has no memory of ever testing Fish! on the machine. “I can’t vouch for whether Magnetic Scrolls actually developed an Apple IIe version of Fish!, but I suspect it was dropped by both publisher and developer as not being worth the investment in time to produce it,” he tells us.

The situation was also complicated by Rainbird’s imminent loss of the ability to publish games in North America, where distribution was being handled by Mediagenic. With the Apple IIe having comparatively little popularity in the UK and Europe, Richard feels there would have been little commercial incentive to produce a version solely for those territories. He also notes that Apple editions of earlier Magnetic Scrolls titles weren’t advertised within the UK press.

The Macintosh version is slightly less clear. Richard doesn’t remember seeing or testing a version of Fish! for the machine, but importantly he also doesn’t recall being told that it had been cancelled.

“From memory, the Macintosh version of Corruption was one of the last versions we got to test for that game, so I suspect Fish! for the Apple Macintosh would have also been at the tail-end of the development period for Magnetic Scrolls,” Richard explains. However, he suggests that the changing North American distribution situation may similarly have influenced any decision by Rainbird not to proceed with the version.

Richard also found no evidence during his subsequent research that Fish! was released for either Apple IIe or Macintosh, and as a result neither appears within the release tables in the appendices of his new book.

For now, we’re therefore continuing to list both versions with an unconfirmed release status rather than declaring them completely unreleased. The Apple IIe edition perhaps looks increasingly unlikely to have reached completion, while the fate of the Macintosh version remains particularly unclear.

Were either versions actually developed, and if so, how far did they get? Could a late Macintosh build have survived somewhere, or were both abandoned before development was completed? We’d love to hear from anyone who can help establish exactly what happened to these two editions.

With thanks to Bugjam for originally highlighting the missing versions, Richard Hewison for providing his first-hand recollections and additional context, and AtariLegend.com for the cover image.

Platform: Microsoft Xbox 360

Gun Loco was a rather unusual third-person shooter being developed by Square Enix exclusively for the Xbox 360. Set on a remote prison planet populated by some of the universe’s most dangerous and unhinged criminals, the game would see rival inmates battling for survival and ultimately attempting to escape.

The game had a very distinctive style, with a cast based on physical figures created by Hong Kong toy designer Kenny Wong. Characters included everything from street thugs to inmates wearing oversized rabbit heads, while the action mixed third-person shooting with a heavy emphasis on fast movement and brutal close range attacks.

Sprinting was a particularly important part of the game. Players could vault or slide beneath obstacles, dodge around the environment and combine movement with shooting, including sliding attacks and particularly violent finishing moves. Multiplayer was also a major part of the plans, with support announced for up to 12 players.

Gun Loco was announced during Gamescom in August 2010 and was playable shortly afterwards at the Tokyo Game Show. Various hands-on reports online described the game as having an interesting and unusual concept which was still clearly in need of further refinement, with criticism aimed at areas such as the AI, camera and general polish.

The game was due for release during 2011, but on the 18th March that year Square Enix announced that development had ceased and Gun Loco was cancelled worldwide. No official explanation was provided for the decision. Interestingly, Square Enix would later reveal that it had introduced tighter selection criteria for its forthcoming line-up, resulting in a number of project cancellations. Gun Loco had been cancelled shortly beforehand.

Thankfully, in early 2020, a September 2010 build was discovered by DoublesAdvocate on one of a collection of discarded Xbox 360 development kits originating from Canada. The build was identified as the version demonstrated publicly at the Tokyo Game Show. It was released by ObscureGamers on the 1st March 2020 as part of their 2020 release-a-thon and has since been documented by Hidden Palace.

Further material would surface in January 2023, when Archive.org user Lander uploaded another collection containing previously unknown Gun Loco builds. However, there was more hiding within the surviving development material. A user named fangboy12 shared an unlock which allowed access to hidden single-player content within one of the builds, opening up substantially more of the unfinished game for exploration.

This is where we first became aware of just how much Gun Loco material had survived. Aeritha got in touch with Games That Weren’t after spending a considerable amount of time exploring the prototype and recording what appears to be one of the most comprehensive looks at the cancelled game so far.

The resulting long play runs for around six hours, working through all of the accessible single player levels in the order presented by the development build. Not everything functions correctly, and some missions appear to be missing or inaccessible, but a surprising amount can be explored.

Aeritha also extracted and presented all of the movie sequences contained within the build, including several which don’t normally play during the available missions. Some provide additional story context which would otherwise be very difficult to see.

Other surviving content includes vehicles such as a tank and helicopter, while Aeritha has also produced separate videos showing the playable characters, a spacecraft-based fast travel mechanic and the original TGS 2010 portion of the game. Multiplayer unfortunately remains inaccessible, as the surviving builds attempt to connect to servers which are no longer available.

It is a fantastic amount of footage which is worth deep diving into (See below!)

With a huge thank you to Aeritha for highlighting the recovery and putting so much time into documenting the surviving content. Screenshots are from Aeritha’s video.

Downloads

• https://hiddenpalace.org/Gun_Loco_(Sep_13,_2010_prototype)
• https://archive.org/details/gun_loco

Video

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Platform: Nintendo Virtual Boy

As part of the launch and release of The Games That Weren’t book, we are  adding assets and content that didn’t make it to print as bonus DLC content to share with you.

Virtual Tank was an unreleased 3D action game in development at Boss Game Studios for Nintendo’s ill-fated Virtual Boy, and is a title we covered extensively in the first Games That Weren’t book.

The idea came from the studio’s creative director Seth Mendelsohn, who saw the Virtual Boy hardware and immediately thought of Atari’s classic arcade game Battlezone. The system’s controls seemed particularly well suited to driving a tank, while its distinctive red and black display was also a natural fit for a game inspired by an old vector arcade title.

Originally known as 3D Tank, the project was pitched successfully to Nintendo and entered development during 1995. Rather than being a hardcore tank simulation, the intention was to create an accessible arcade action game, expanding upon the Battlezone formula with different weapons, enemies, missions and terrain to navigate.

Development progressed surprisingly well in a short period of time. After around three to four months, the team had a playable game with ground and air enemies, targets to destroy, a working HUD and enemy scanner, along with a small number of levels. Although still some distance from completion, it had progressed beyond being a simple technical demonstration.

Unfortunately, Virtual Tank was being developed for a system whose commercial life was about to collapse quickly. Following the disappointing launch of the Virtual Boy, Boss Game Studios saw the writing on the wall and Nintendo encouraged the team to concentrate instead on its Nintendo 64 developments. With the game designed specifically around the Virtual Boy hardware, there was little reason to move it elsewhere and development came to an end.

Thankfully, the game wasn’t completely lost. Many years later, Seth revealed that he had retained a build and was able to get it running again, allowing us to show screenshots from the game for the first time as part of our original feature. We’ve been told that it isn’t possible for them to release anything of the game.

The complete story of Virtual Tank, including extensive recollections from Seth Mendelsohn, Hans Piwenitzky, Warrick Holfeld and Rob Povey, can be found in the first Games That Weren’t book. We also published the chapter online with Nintendo Life, so rather than repeat the full story again here, you can read the complete feature at the link below:

The Story Of Virtual Tank, A Lost Virtual Boy Successor To Atari’s Battlezone – Nintendo Life

For this bonus GTW entry, we’ve added a selection of additional photographs kindly sent to us by Seth, showing Virtual Tank running along with his surviving Virtual Boy development kit. These particular images didn’t make it into the book, so we’re very happy to finally add them to the archive below.

Unfortunately, the prototype itself isn’t currently available for release. Hopefully another copy may surface independently one day so that people can finally experience this intriguing lost Virtual Boy title for themselves.

With a huge thank you to Seth Mendelsohn for his help with the original feature and for sharing the additional photographs with Games That Weren’t.

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Platform: Amstrad CPC

Earlier in 2026, we added a very early and completely different version of Vixen for the ZX Spectrum, which was being developed by Keith A Goodyer with graphics by The S.A.M. Thanks once again to Dean Hickingbottom, we can now follow that up with an Amstrad CPC edition of the same early development, but in two very different forms!

Like the Spectrum version, this is very different to the eventual Vixen game that was eventually released by Martech in 1988. It provides another great glimpse at how the game was originally taking shape before development changed direction with a different team and the version we know today was produced.

With these particular prototypes, the first version experimented with a lower resolution edition with a very large main sprite and colourful backgrounds. There are three versions, one of which contains some test enemies and the whip weapon, but you’re unable to kill anything. The other two prototypes just have the main character running (one also has a temporary title screen).

At this stage, the game it seems was called “The Valley”, before eventually being renamed to Vixen. Vixen eventually became particularly well known for its advertising campaign featuring model Corrine Russell, which attracted a fair amount of controversy at the time. It’s plausible that before Corrine’s link to the game, it was intended to go in a quite different direction with “The Valley”.

Once the game was renamed to Vixen, it seems the low-res graphics mode was dropped and a hi-res mode was taken on, giving a very distinctive new look and using the mult-colour hi-res mode of the CPC to good effect. The last build has a large enemy walking around and you can use your whip weapon. It seems Martech were not happy with either of the results, and another team was brought in to do the game instead.

Hopefully in time we’ll get to learn more about these developments. Based on the graphics in the background, the code was again by Keith A Goodyer. It’s uncertain who the graphics are by.

To load the files, the BIN files can be loaded by doing RUN”FILENAME . The COM files, you will first need to type |CPM followed by the name of the file (without the .COM extension).

With a huge thank you once again to Dean Hickingbottom for recovering the development and passing it on to Games That Weren’t for preservation.

Download

• Prototype_VixenCPC

Video

Gallery