Platform: Nintendo Game Boy Advance

Next into the archives is news of a very interesting conversion of The Settlers which got surprisingly close to completion before being abruptly cancelled. The game was being developed for Ubisoft at Hyperion by a small team based in Leeds, including veteran artist Simon Butler and programmer Phillip “TAG” Taglione.

Simon first highlighted the game to Games That Weren’t in 2025, recalling it as a “smashing little project” that the team thoroughly enjoyed working on. There were only around three or four people working together in a tiny room in Leeds, including another artist whose name Simon unfortunately can no longer recall.

Simon was responsible for creating sprites for the game and thankfully still has some of his graphical work today. We hope to add a selection of those surviving assets to this page in the future, which should at least provide a glimpse of how this lost handheld conversion was shaping up.

Unfortunately, very little is currently known about the game itself or how The Settlers had been adapted for Nintendo’s handheld. What we do know is that development had progressed a long way before cancellation. Simon recalls that the game was fairly close to completion, estimating that perhaps only another month or two of development remained.

The team themselves were not told why the project was cancelled. Everything had apparently been progressing well until one day a telephone call came through and that was it. Development was stopped immediately, much to the frustration of everyone involved.

“We had maybe a month or two more before we were finished, but one day there was a call and that was it, game cancelled,” Simon recalled to GTW.

Simon remembers the cancellation being particularly disappointing because the small team worked well together and genuinely enjoyed what they were creating.

When it comes to learning more about the game – sadly, programmer Phillip “TAG” Taglione passed away in 2019.  Given Simon’s recollection that the game was perhaps only a month or two away from completion, there must once have been a substantial playable build. Whether anything still survives today is another question.

It would be amazing to see something of The Settlers again one day, not only to discover how this unusual Game Boy Advance conversion was shaping up, but also to help preserve and celebrate some of Phillip’s work. If you worked on the game, know who the other members of the small Hyperion team were, or perhaps have any surviving materials or builds, please do get in touch.

With a huge thank you to Simon Butler for highlighting the game, sharing his memories and preserving some of his original graphical work (to be added soon).

Platforms: SNES, N64

Project Dream, also known as Dream: Land of Giants, was an ambitious RPG in development at Rare during the mid-1990s, initially for the Super Nintendo before development moved across to the Nintendo 64. After numerous changes in direction, the project was eventually abandoned and reworked into what would become Banjo-Kazooie.

The original game starred a young boy named Edson, who became caught up with a group of pirates led by Captain Blackeye. Rare had ambitions to create a large RPG influenced by the likes of Japanese RPGs and LucasArts adventures, using and expanding upon the graphical technology developed for the Donkey Kong Country series.

Eventually, Dream proved too ambitious for the Super Nintendo and development moved to the Nintendo 64. The project continued to evolve significantly, with Edson eventually replaced first by a rabbit and then a bear named Banjo. Rare ultimately abandoned the RPG concept altogether and concentrated on creating a platform game around Banjo, leading to Banjo-Kazooie in 1998.

There is already a huge amount of information about the development and evolution of Project Dream, with excellent detailed histories available at Unseen64 and The Cutting Room Floor, which we’ve linked to here and below. Rather than repeat all of their research here, we’re going to concentrate on a significant development in the preservation of the original game. If anything else comes to light about the development, then we’ll add to the page here.

SNES prototype released

On 9 September 2026, an anonymous source using the name FvckAsha&Phil publicly released what they describe as the SNES proof-of-concept alpha of Project Dream onto the Internet Archive. According to the release notes, the source had possessed the prototype for a number of years, having received it through several other people. They declined to reveal exactly how the prototype had originally surfaced, partly out of concern that doing so could potentially get someone into trouble.

The source explained that concerns about potentially getting someone into trouble had previously prevented them from releasing it, but that after so many years they now felt it was more important for the prototype to be properly preserved and examined by those with the technical knowledge to investigate it further.

The archive contains a raw .bin dump of the prototype together with an identical copy renamed with an .sfc extension for easier use with SNES emulators, as well as the accompanying release notes. This is particularly significant because although Rare itself had previously shown footage of Dream, having the actual prototype publicly preserved means the early development can now be explored and analysed.

The anonymous source also expressed hope that releasing Dream might encourage others to preserve prototypes they still have in their possession, specifically mentioning a prototype of Twelve Tales: Conker 64 which they believe still exists somewhere. They stressed, however, that Project Dream was the only prototype they personally had to release.

Hopefully their wish comes true and more material from Dream, Twelve Tales and other lost Rare projects eventually finds its way into preservation.

For now, it is fantastic to finally see this important piece of Rare history publicly preserved after all these years. We’ve included links below to the prototype itself, along with the extensive existing coverage at Unseen64 and The Cutting Room Floor for anyone wanting to delve much deeper into the fascinating development history of Project Dream.

With thanks to Vinícius Medeiros for heads up about the release via Twitter.

Download

• Project Dream SNES prototype – Internet Archive

Video

Gallery

Further information

• Unseen64 – Project Dream / Banjo-Kazooie
• The Cutting Room Floor – Project Dream

Platforms: Amiga AGA / CD32

Hired Guns is regarded by many as one of the finest first-person action RPGs ever released on the Amiga, so it should perhaps come as little surprise that an enhanced AGA edition was once in development. Never released commercially, the project remained little more than a rumour for many years until a surviving prototype eventually surfaced online, giving us a fascinating glimpse at what original programmer Scott Johnston had been experimenting with.

For a long time, the existence of the AGA version was only really hinted at. That changed when Scott mentioned the build in a 2000 review of Bloodwych. Whilst discussing the influences behind Hired Guns, Scott casually revealed that an unreleased AGA version existed and noted that one of his favourite sound effects was only present in that enhanced edition.

Over the years, further snippets of information emerged through forum discussions and comments from those connected with the game. Scott later described an enhanced version featuring new levels, new weapons, improved graphics, extra sound effects and a special lighting system. He also noted that one of the most ambitious additions was smoother 45 degree rotation, which consumed a significant amount of the extra memory available on AGA systems.

For a long time, however, that was all anyone had. The enhanced version was spoken about occasionally, but very few people had ever seen it and many wondered whether anything had actually survived.

The origins of Hired Guns

In 2026, Games That Weren’t spoke to original Hired Guns writer Steve Hammond, who provided a wealth of new information about the game, the people involved and the eventual AGA experiment. Steve’s involvement came about in a rather unexpected way, thanks to his love of tabletop role-playing games and science fiction.

“I can thank Cyberpunk 2020 for that!” began Steve. “The tabletop role playing game (of the dark future!) was something I played with non-DMA friends some evenings. Within the game setting you had these ‘screamsheets’, short single-page vitriolic newspapers. I had a dot-matrix printer. I had an Amiga. And I thought it would be so cool to make a real one featuring the adventures of our characters.”

“Of course DMA had a fancy laser printer and so I created a screamsheet of much higher quality… and pinned one to the wall of my not-quite-cubicle (we called them ‘caves’ and weren’t supposed to do that… they preferred open-plan). I was really just trying to hide myself away from the bustle of the office. Right next to the fileserver, which provided some much-needed white noise. Scott and I regularly talked Sci Fi over lunch in town, and at work. One day he ambled across, saw the printout, was impressed, and just asked if I wanted to write the HG story. How could I not?”

Steve went on to develop the characters, story and background, while also starting work on the manual. At the time he was reading Iain M. Banks’ Consider Phlebas, which helped inspire the decision to make the protagonists mercenaries.

What happened to Hired Guns 2?

There had initially been plans for a proper Hired Guns 2, with Steve and Scott discussing where the series could go next. Their shared interest in Celtic history even found its way into the original game.

“It was entirely Scott,” Steve explained when discussing the later AGA project. “We’d been talking about Hired Guns 2, and what we wanted in it. As the original was nearing completion, we discovered a shared interest in Celtic history, and wanted to somehow crowbar this into the new one. There was still a little time until HG was done, so I quickly added a planet to the manual and gave it the Celtic name Taranus, as a little foreshadowing.”

However, Hired Guns only broke even, and Steve recalls being told that piracy meant the sequel was not going ahead. Scott subsequently left DMA. Steve continued to develop ideas for the sequel on his own, but these never progressed beyond notes. Meanwhile, Scott appears to have taken a different route with the original game.

Scott’s AGA experiment

With the arrival of the Amiga CD32 and its additional memory, storage and colour capabilities, Scott began experimenting with an enhanced version of Hired Guns in his own time. “He did coding and graphics… all of it aside from the music,” Steve told us. “With the availability of the Amiga CD32, that allowed more colours, more data, more everything, and Scott started on an enhancement of HG entirely on his own time.”

Exactly what the ultimate commercial intention was remains uncertain. Steve isn’t sure whether it was ever planned as an official release and suspects that Scott may simply have been experimenting with what could be achieved.

“I don’t actually know this, though I suspect it was Scott just tinkering,” Steve explained. “I don’t remember when I found out that it existed, but it must have been after I’d left DMA. Knowing Scott, though, it would certainly have been ambitious.”

That ambition was very much characteristic of Scott’s earlier work too. Steve points out that Scott had already been using techniques that would still sound advanced many years later. “I’ve seen people just this year saying they’re clever because they create 2D game sprites from a 3D render. Scott was doing that in 1991! In the game Walker, animation came from a 3D renderer he wrote in AmigaBasic!”

The surviving prototype certainly reflects that experimental approach, with improved graphics, enhanced sound, lighting effects, new menu systems, AGA-specific colour modes and CD32-related functionality. At one point, Scott had even considered using more advanced artificial intelligence for the enemies.

“At one point he was intending for the Hired Guns enemies to be driven by a neural net, until he was persuaded by the other guys that it was impractical. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d planned some big improvements to the intelligence.”

The AGA prototype

When the prototype eventually surfaced publicly in 2021, it became clear that the project had progressed considerably further than many had expected.

What emerged was an enhanced Amiga CD and CD32-flavoured version of Hired Guns, although exactly what it was intended to become remains slightly unclear. The game refers to itself in various places as Hired Guns Amiga CD and Hired Guns CD AGA, whilst development files refer to it as Hired Guns CD32.

The prototype includes a surprising number of improvements over the original release. There is a completely new introduction sequence, a redesigned front end menu system, a new 256 colour world map, enhanced lighting effects, updated sound effects and a number of graphical improvements throughout the game.

One of the most noticeable changes is the new lighting system. Whilst fairly simple by modern standards, it gives levels a much greater sense of atmosphere compared to the original release. Areas are no longer lit uniformly, with light sources illuminating nearby sections whilst objects cast shadows and block light.

A number of screens were also enhanced to take advantage of AGA hardware. The mission map was regenerated with a much richer colour palette, removing much of the dithering seen in the original release. Between level graphics were also recreated in HAM 8 mode, allowing for dramatically improved colour depth, although parts of the display routines appear unfinished and do not always render correctly in the prototype.

The audio side saw attention too. New weapon sounds were added, including the famous Schmeisser-inspired sub-machine gun effect that Scott had highlighted years earlier. Some existing weapon sounds were replaced, whilst various monsters were also intended to receive a wider range of effects.

The prototype even introduces a brand new weapon. Clavius now starts the game with a Sub-Machine Gun instead of the original Blaster, complete with its own ammunition type and sound effects. Various balance changes were also made to character starting equipment, suggesting that gameplay was still actively being refined.

At some stage the project also appears to have been targeting Commodore’s CD32 console. A special GameCtrl mode was added, along with menu systems that could be controlled without a keyboard. However, the implementation was unfinished. The game still relies heavily on keyboard shortcuts for many functions, support for CD32-specific saving is absent and some controller functionality appears broken.

Attempting to run the prototype directly on a CD32 reveals just how incomplete the conversion remained, with the game eventually dropping out to an AmigaDOS prompt.

What was missing?

One of the biggest surprises from Steve’s recollections is how much of the original story had already been developed outside the game.

Steve’s planned plot involved a hostage rescue which would eventually be revealed as a trap designed to lure a team of mercenaries into field-testing highly illegal biological weapons. The player would then have to obtain proof of what had happened. Unfortunately, the limitations of the original game forced the story to be drastically simplified.

“Then that awful day when I was sat down by Scott and one of the managers Simon, and told that there wasn’t enough space in the game to fit it in!” Steve recalled. “Ultimately the in-game story turned into some guff about blowing stuff up with nukes.”

Much of the wider background nevertheless survived in the manual, including references to The Boundary and the loss of communication with Earth. Steve had also planted ideas for future stories that never got the chance to be explored. One particularly nice example was a fictional piece of technology that appeared in his original story material.

“My version has a page with a camera in it, a relic of the original story, game graphic and everything. It’s a camera where I describe it as an ‘image authentication’ camera, where they footage can be proved to be un-faked. (In 1992 no less!) I think we all need one of those.”

There were even traces of Hired Guns’ earlier history as a fantasy game. Steve recalls that Graeme Anderson created a fantasy introduction sequence before the game’s science fiction direction was established, although as far as he knows that material has since been lost.

Cheule and the ideas that almost survived

Steve also shared an interesting story about Cheule, one of the game’s characters, and what could have become a much more significant part of the series’ wider narrative.

“The character of Cheule is from Earth. Contact was lost with Earth. That would have formed the overall arc plot subsequently had everything gone supernaturally well for me! However… Cheule was in fact the main character, and when I was describing the characters to one of the artists for doing portraits, I described her as black.”

Steve had taken inspiration from Eve in the comic series Third World War, but the intended depiction did not make it into the final artwork.

“The artist subsequently ignored all my descriptions, did a set of a dozen random characters and – because of deadlines – that was now all locked in. So we lost having a black woman as a protagonist in a computer game in 1992. As far as I know that would have been a world first.”

How close was the AGA version?

Although the surviving prototype contains a substantial amount of work, Steve doesn’t regard it as particularly close to a finished release.

“There’s a long way to go,” he tells us. “I think someone’s got it working, but I haven’t seen it. It’d be great to get it into a proper revision control system, get people interested, and finish it. Can’t see that happening, though. But with the latest news about Amiga, maybe there’s the possibility of someone resurrecting and updating it.”

This is important when considering what the AGA version actually represents. It wasn’t simply a nearly finished commercial conversion waiting for a final round of testing. Instead, it appears to have been Scott’s ambitious personal continuation of Hired Guns, with no confirmed publishing plan behind it.

Eventually, work stopped.

How the prototype survived

Around 1998, Scott contacted Steve after no longer having an Amiga and offered him the hard drive containing his development files. In the gallery, you can see the Amiga 1200 dev kit that the game was developed on, thanks to Mike Dailly.

“He contacted me sometime in 1998, saying that he no longer had an Amiga and would I like the hard drive with all the dev files on it. Obviously I said yes, he posted it to me, and I turned the drive into a large zip file for preservation.”

Steve kept the material privately for many years, eventually passing copies onwards. He also tried to secure official permission for a wider release.

“I can’t remember who it was managed to get official permission from Psygnosis for the level editor to be released. I later contacted Sony (yeah, it was still possible to do that back then!) to get permission to release the whole lot as open source. The reply showed that they didn’t really know what that meant (what was my business plan???) and the effort stalled.”

The prototype was eventually provided to members of the retro gaming community who helped get it into circulation. Steve stresses that he did not personally upload it to the Internet Archive, but confirms that the publicly available version can ultimately be traced back to the hard drive Scott sent him.

A surviving piece of Hired Guns history

There is very little surviving material compared with some of the larger projects Steve worked on, but his archive still contains a fascinating collection of related material.

“I have a few printouts, lists of weapons, level design template printouts and a whole load of prints of my text, including in my idea of a manual. I have some concept drawings of spacecraft I made for that manual, but all that was mostly sundry, not included in the game proper.”

He also has early graphical material from before the final version of Hired Guns. “Certainly I have some graphics from a very early version. That was when Scott had the digitised giant heads of some staff travelling up and down the levels. Proof of concept, I think!”

Some of the material Steve supplied, including scans from his original manual, you can find below in the gallery. Despite everything that was lost, Steve is pleased that players can finally experience the AGA work.

The game clearly remained close to Steve’s heart. He recalls fans asking him to sign several original Hired Guns boxes at Kickstart 3 in 2026, something which he found remarkable after all these years. The AGA version may never have become the official enhanced release that some Amiga owners hoped for, but it is now possible to experience this unusual continuation of one of the system’s most respected games.

It also raises the possibility of more material surviving elsewhere. Given that Scott’s original hard drive, Steve’s own archive and other copies all existed independently, there may still be further development files, artwork or builds waiting to be found.

For now, the surviving prototype provides a unique glimpse at Scott Johnston’s continued experimentation with Hired Guns, while Steve Hammond’s recollections add a fascinating amount of context around both the original game and the ideas that never quite made it into it. Hopefully more of the story can be preserved in the future.

With a huge thank you to Steve Hammond for taking the time to share his memories, answer our questions and provide further material from his personal archive.

Download

• https://archive.org/details/hired-guns-cd-32-dev-files

Video

Gallery

Interview with Steve Hammond

In August 2026, Games That Weren’t spoke with original Hired Guns writer Steve Hammond about his involvement with the game, Scott Johnston’s AGA experiment, the story ideas that were cut, the survival of the development files and some of the many other projects and anecdotes surrounding his time at DMA Design.

Steve very kindly provided extensive answers, along with scans and other surviving material from his archive. The complete interview follows below.

Frank: For readers who may not know, what was your role on Hired Guns and how did you become involved with the project?

Steve: I can thank Cyberpunk 2020 for that! The tabletop role playing game (of the dark future!) was something I played with non-DMA friends some evenings. Within the game setting you had these “screamsheets”, short single-page vitriolic newspapers. I had a dot-matrix printer. I had an Amiga. And I thought it would be so cool to make a real one featuring the adventures of our characters.

Of course DMA had a fancy laser printer and so I created a screamsheet of much higher quality… and pinned one to the wall of my not-quite-cubicle (we called them “caves” and weren’t supposed to do that… they preferred open-plan). I was really just trying to hide myself away from the bustle of the office. Right next to the fileserver, which provided some much-needed white noise.

Scott and I regularly talked Sci Fi over lunch in town, and at work. One day he ambled across, saw the printout, was impressed, and just asked if I wanted to write the HG story. How could I not?

So that was what happened, I started working on the characters, the story, and the background. I also made a start on turning it all into a manual. At the time I was reading Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks, which inspired me to make the characters mercenaries.

Frank: Scott Johnston’s name is closely associated with both the original game and the AGA version. How much of the enhanced version was being driven by Scott, and who else was involved?

Steve: It was entirely Scott. We’d been talking about Hired Guns 2, and what we wanted in it. As the original was nearing completion, we discovered a shared interest in Celtic history, and wanted to somehow crowbar this into the new one. There was still a little time until HG was done, so I quickly added a planet to the manual and gave it the Celtic name Taranus, as a little foreshadowing.

Hired Guns broke even. I was told that piracy meant HG2 wasn’t going ahead, and Scott subsequently left DMA. I’m pretty sure that played a part in his decision.After that I didn’t have much contact with him.

In the aftermath, I worked on an idea for Hired Guns 2 anyway, which would only really have had the name in common, but it didn’t get any further than some notes. I wanted the background to be two warring alien races, in which a human colony ship – unarmed – finds itself in the middle of it all. The fun would come from improving weapons from anything on board. Medical lasers, carving knives, that sort of thing.

With the availability of the Amiga CD32, that allowed more colours, more data, more everything, and Scott started on an enhancement of HG entirely on his own time. He did coding and graphics… all of it aside from the music. I’m not sure what the overall plan was for publishing, but eventually he gave up on it without it being finished. He contacted me sometime in 1998, saying that he no longer had an Amiga and would I like the hard drive with all the dev files on it.

Obviously I said yes, he posted it to me, and I turned the drive into a large zip file for preservation. I can’t remember who it was managed to get official permission from Psygnosis for the level editor to be released. I later contacted Sony (yeah, it was still possible to do that back then!) to get permission to release the whole lot as open source. The reply showed that they didn’t really know what that meant (what was my business plan???) and the effort stalled.

Frank: What was the original goal for Hired Guns AGA? Was it intended as a straightforward enhancement, a CD32 release, or something more ambitious?

Steve: I don’t actually know this, though I suspect it was Scott just tinkering. I don’t remember when I found out that it existed, but it must have been after I’d left DMA. Knowing Scott, though, it would certainly have been ambitious. I’ve seen people just this year saying they’re clever because they create 2D game sprites from a 3D render. Scott was doing that in 1991! In the game Walker, animation came from a 3D renderer he wrote in AmigaBasic!

At one point he was intending for the Hired Guns enemies to be driven by a neural net, until he was persuaded by the other guys that it was impractical. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d planned some big improvements to the intelligence.

Frank: Looking back now, how complete would you say the project actually was when development stopped, and how close did you feel it was to a potential release?

Steve: There’s a long way to go. I think someone’s got it working, but haven’t seen it. It’d be great to get it into a proper revision control system, get people interested, and finish it. Can’t see that happening, though. But with the latest news about Amiga, maybe there’s the possibility of someone resurrecting and updating it.

Frank: The prototype hints at additional levels, content and features that never made it into the public build. What was originally planned that we don’t get to see today?

Steve: Bit of a tale, that one. Literally. What never made it into the game was my original plot! It was a hostage rescue, in which it is eventually revealed to be a ploy to lure in a team of mercenaries. The truth being that they were only there to provide a field test for some highly-illegal biological creatures created as weapons. The story then became obtaining proof.

Then that awful day when I was sat down by Scott and one of the managers Simon, and told that there wasn’t enough space in the game to fit it in! Ultimately the in-game story turned into some guff about blowing stuff up with nukes.

The background in the manual remained intact for the most part, set against The Boundary ten years previously in which all communication was lost with Earth. I put in a lot of details which were intended to pay off later. In fact I was halfway through typesetting the manual myself when Psygnosis decided they were going to do it (or at least get a third party to do it.) My version has a page with a camera in it, a relic of the original story, game graphic and everything. It’s a camera where I describe it as an “image authentication” camera, where they footage can be proved to be un-faked. (In 1992 no less!) I think we all need one of those.

But there’s some distorted elements in evidence, such as the box cover saying they were fighting “mutants”, which was so far from the truth. And I guess a lot of the assets, from before I started causing trouble, never made it in because HG was originally a fantasy game. Graeme Anderson animated a fantasy intro sequence which as far as I know has been lost to time.

Frank: What ultimately happened to the project, and why did it never reach release?

Steve: Ultimately, it wasn’t an official project. It was owned by Psygnosis, who were bought by Sony, so as far as I know it belongs to them. Around the same time – 1997 – I was working on a Hired Guns remake with Devils Thumb Entertainment. DMA was bought by Gremlin, who were a publisher. HG being owned by Psygnosis – a different publisher – meant the project had to go. And it did… to DTE for which I had to go freelance to keep working on it.

The remake was using the Unreal Engine, for modern PCs (as they were then) so no push to do anything Amiga-related. The remake stalled, I was let go because they said they weren’t using third parties anymore, and that was that. No more games industry for me. I have an unfinished ISO of that, grabbed from a dark corner of the web, but in 20+ years I haven’t found the will to even try looking at it. From what I’ve seen of YouTube clips, it was kind of uninspired.

Still, I ended up with a whole load of story and further background I wrote… most of which I did late at night at home. Not on company time! Only way to get the peace to think properly!

Frank: Are there any particular features in the AGA version that you’re especially proud of or wish players had seen properly finished?

Steve: I can’t speak for Scott, and I’m probably being a bit selfish when I think that the main thing I want players to see is my story. After the release, I planned out in rough detail the next stages of the tale. I even knew how the whole thing was supposed to end after five games (yeah, very much inspired by Babylon 5 which I was and am a huge fan of.)

These days I’m trying to muster the willpower to write a novel based on all those ideas which never quite made it in, the stuff I fleshed out afterwards, and all the things I figured I would change. Probably an entirely new story by now.

Proud… well, the most pride I have is something which /almost/ made it in. The character of Cheule is from Earth. Contact was lost with Earth. That would have formed the overall arc plot subsequently had everything gone supernaturally well for me! However… Cheule was in fact the main character, and when I was describing the characters to one of the artists for doing portraits, I described her as black. My inspiration was Eve in the comic series Third World War. The artist subsequently ignored all my descriptions, did a set of a dozen random characters and – because of deadlines – that was now all locked in. So we lost having a black woman as a protagonist in a computer game in 1992. As far as I know that would have been a world first.

I remember one magazine at the time said in a review something like Hired Guns has robots! Hired Guns has women! Hired Guns has robot women! I am utterly baffled at some of the present-day gamers who get all weird about a game having a woman or someone of colour as a main character or indeed having any diversity at all. A stream of short-haired white chiselled men with stubble and a grimace gets old after a while. Pick your protagonist out of a line-up!

Frank: After keeping hold of the files for so many years, how do you feel about people finally being able to experience the AGA version today?

Steve: So glad. It’s the authentic Hired Guns experience. Someone, years ago, tried making their own modern version, which didn’t get very far. Someone else got a decent way into making a Sci Fi dungeon crawler which was explicitly inspired by Hired Guns. There’s not much fan art out there, but I have seen some. And from comments made over the years, I know HG is highly regarded. It would be nice to reward them.

At Kickstart 3 this year, I must have signed at least four or five Hired Guns boxes, and that feels remarkable to me. I just want to do something nice for them!

Frank: Is there any additional material still out there, such as source code, artwork, design notes, earlier/later builds or even concepts that never progressed beyond the planning stage?

Steve: There’s very little compared to all the other big projects. I have a few printouts, lists of weapons, level design template printouts and a whole load of prints of my text, including in my idea of a manual. I have some concept drawings of spacecraft I made for that manual, but all that was mostly sundry, not included in the game proper. If there were any concept drawings made by the artists, I never saw them.

Certainly I have some graphics from a very early version. That was when Scott had the digitised giant heads of some staff travelling up and down the levels. Proof of concept, I think!

Frank: Are there any other memories or anecdotes about the development of Hired Guns (and maybe specifically the AGA edition) that you’d like to share?

Steve: Yeah! Because I’m an astronomy nut, I wanted to have the star system in Hired Guns be a real one. I had a book called The Science in Science Fiction which had a diagram of the nearest stars to the Sun, which I thought looked really cool. So I arbitrarily chose one just over 11 light years away, Luyten L789-6. (For some reason it’s just referred to in the manual as Luyten). Turns out, years later, when I was seriously into astronomy to the point of doing an Open University course – and passing! – that I looked back at the diagram and saw loads of mistakes! The book had the magnitude diagram backwards! I’d thought they were all sun-like stars because they were depicted in yellow, but L786-6 is a red dwarf!

So anyway, when we found out about Frontier: Elite II and that all the stars were real ones, Scott wrote to David Braben to try and get some easter eggs in Elite: our (real) star system and vice-versa, but we never heard back. That would have been so cool, though.

If/when I do the novel I’m going to totally lean into the red dwarf part. Because it’s actually a triple-star system, all red dwarfs, all flare stars. Now that’s more interesting than a plain old star like the Sun…

Oh, and the copy protection in HG where you have to enter a star parameter from a list in the manual? I wrote a Pascal program to generate those values. Values which, in retrospect, might have been pure nonsense! But of course no-one ever pulled us up on that.

I remember water being a relatively late addition to the game.

And… and… I’m sure any followup questions will prompt some other memories. Thanks for asking me about HG. It deserves some love!

Platform: Unknown

Upon Westminster Bridge is a mysterious unreleased adventure game that was once in development at Magnetic Scrolls, seemingly as a personal project of company founder Anita Sinclair. Very little is currently known about the title, and for many years it seems to have been confused with Corruption, Magnetic Scrolls’ 1988 financial thriller. Various references have suggested that Upon Westminster Bridge was an early working title for that game, but this doesn’t appear to have been the case.

The distinction was highlighted by Jimmy Maher in an excellent Digital Antiquarian article covering Corruption and Fish!, with further clarification in the discussion underneath. Jimmy pointed towards an older interview conducted by Peter Verdi with Corruption author Rob Steggles for the Magnetic Scrolls Chronicles website.

Rob was asked about any Magnetic Scrolls projects which had never seen the light of day and recalled Upon Westminster Bridge as something Anita Sinclair had been working on. More importantly, when asked what the game was actually about, he felt that was something only Anita herself should answer.

Considering Rob was responsible for Corruption, this seems to provide strong evidence that Upon Westminster Bridge was a completely separate project rather than an early name for his game. The Digital Antiquarian research also suggests that the project was something of a personal project for Anita and was apparently intended to be text-only. That would have made it quite unusual for Magnetic Scrolls, whose adventures had become particularly well known for their graphical presentation.

Unfortunately, we didn’t know much more than that. There were no confirmed details about the storyline, target platforms or exactly how far development progressed. Even the title gave little away. It was also unknown whether any code, notes, design material or other remains of the project still survived today.

Thanks to Stone Oakvalley, several fragments were mentioned in Computer and Video Games in various issues (added to scans):

Computer and Video Games Issue 065 mar 87, page 61:

“Guild Of Thieves, the next adventure scheduled by Rainbird from Magnetic Scrolls, is due out any time now. It will be less difficult than The Pawn, but with “superb graphics”, claims Anita Sinclair. Magnetic Scrolls has a hectic schedule ahead of it. A third adventure is planned for release in March. Upon Westminster Bridge — a title openly stolen from Wordsworth. it will be a mystery of sorts, but with a very novel approach. “I’m very excited about it. but some people might not even like it .” Anita told me. If you find you don’t you won’t have to wait long for their next offering — planned for release in July.”

Computer and Video Games Issue_067 may 87, page 64:

“When Guild comes out, it will do so for all machines in quick succession, since the donkey work of writing the systems has been completed. And then Anita and her crew will be able to concentrate on the next title. It could be Upon Westminster Bridge, which will be a completely different type of adventure. Or it might even be one presently code-named GM another saga of Kerovnia. But Rainbird Software. the publishers, will not let me reveal the proper title. Which it is, you won’t have so long to wait this time. It’s due to hit the streets within the next two or three months.”

Computer and Video Games Issue 072 oct 87 page 81:

“Looking ahead, Scrolls are rushing to complete another adventure by the end of the year. Anita has also found some time to get back to her current pet project entitled Upon Westminster Bridge. “Westminster will be the first Scrolls title written by one of us, consequently I think it’ll be our best! no seriously it’s a departure from games like The Pawn and Guild, for a start there’s no graphics. It won’t be ready for another year though!” “As to the future, well we’d like to get to the stage where we had a “black box” parser which other companies could use in their games — not adventures you understand, but things like a flight simulator you could talk to!”

Australian Commodore Review Volume 4 Issue_5 1987, page 42:

“On its way to Australia is the follow up to The Pawn, The Guild of Thieves is rumoured to be easier than The Pawn, with greater graphics, Currently in its production stages is Upon Westminster Bridge, a thrilling mystery – probably another winner for Magnetic Scrolls/Rainbird”

Thanks also to Strident, he reveals via the comments that Mark Hardisty interviewed Anita for Classic Adventurer (Issue 3), where she said this about UWB:

“It was my game. I just didn’t have the time to finish it. I was running around doing everything else. Every time I sat down to write it there was another crisis to solve. Programming is a very solitary activity. To program you need to have nothing else on your mind, and at that time I was just running around fighting fires and I couldn’t write. It’s a real shame, because It was going to be an Anita game, which was different to other games. I don’t really remember much about it to be honest. In those days I never made notes. It had a murder mystery element, and had a mechanism of playing by many people’s perspectives simultaneously, so was quite interesting. […] I wrote this code around non-playing characters that was super intelligent and in fact an entire language to program them in. I can remember pieces of the coding, but not the story. As I say, I just had no time to do it.”

So, confirmation that it was a different game. Sadly it seems that it could be lost to time, unless Anita comes across any disks with remaining work on to potentially salvage. It sounds like because Anita cannot recall much about it, the game may not have progressed very far at all – so there could be very little to save.

With thanks to Bugjam for highlighting the title, Jimmy Maher and The Digital Antiquarian for helping clarify its history, Strident for highlighting Anita’s interview and Mark Hardisty for Anita’s interview in Classic Adventurer, Stephen Stuttard for scans, Stone Oakvalley for the snippets highlights and Peter Verdi and Rob Steggles for the original Magnetic Scrolls Chronicles interview.

Gallery

At this stage, the demo has no sound and contains what seems to be around two levels, along with cut scenes. The full title sequence is missing, as are the options to redefine keys or select a joystick. Instead, the demo jumps fairly quickly into the first level after part of the title screen and some introductory text.

You can move the main character around and attack with your frying pan, though at this stage you don’t seem to be able to die or kill any of the enemies. Moving off the left-hand side of the screen triggers the demo to load the next level.

In total, there seem to be just two levels present. Attempting to progress to a third will display the relevant cut scene, but instead of loading another level, the game jumps straight to the end sequence.

It is possible that parts of the maps differ from the final release, and there could be other content tucked away in the demo that has yet to be discovered or wasn’t used in the finished game. If you spot anything of interest while exploring the prototype, please let us know and we’ll update the page.

A huge thank you to Dean Hickingbottom for preserving the demo and allowing us to add it to the Games That Weren’t archives.

Download

• Preview_DuckOut(ZX)

Video

Gallery

Platform: Sony PSP

R∞M (Room for PlayStation Portable) was an ambitious online community service developed by Sony Computer Entertainment Japan for the PSP. Announced at the Tokyo Game Show in September 2009, it was intended to provide PSP owners with something similar to a portable version of PlayStation Home.

The free service would allow users to create and customise their own 3D avatars and personal “My Room” spaces, as well as write blogs, create photo albums and form or join groups. Other users could be invited into rooms for real-time communication, including chatting and playing mini-games together.

Sony planned to integrate R∞M directly into the PSP’s XMB interface. Following a system software update, an icon was due to appear beneath the PlayStation Network category, allowing users to download and access the application. All PSP models were intended to support the service.

Although the basic service was intended to be free, Sony also planned to offer additional paid services and content once R∞M officially launched.

Unlike many cancelled projects, R∞M actually made it into the hands of users briefly. Sony announced a closed beta alongside the service at TGS 2009, with Japanese PSP owners able to apply between 24 September and 5 October 2009. Applicants had to be at least 18 years old, have a PlayStation Network master account and be able to access the internet directly from their PSP.

The closed beta began in October 2009 and continued into 2010, allowing selected PSP owners to try the service and provide feedback while development continued. Sony had originally intended the finished version of R∞M to launch during the winter of 2009, but that full public release never happened.

On 15 April 2010, Sony Computer Entertainment Japan formally announced that development of R∞M had been cancelled and the project brought to an end. The company thanked those who had participated in the closed beta for their valuable feedback, stating that this would be used to help with the planning and operation of future community services on PlayStation Network.

No specific reason for the cancellation was given in Sony’s announcement, so suggestions that the beta feedback itself resulted in the project being cancelled should be treated with caution.

Thankfully, R∞M hasn’t been completely lost. A copy of the 2009 client was uploaded to the Internet Archive in December 2022 and can still be downloaded today. Unfortunately, with Sony’s original online infrastructure no longer available, the preserved client currently has no known functionality.

It is nevertheless great to see the software itself preserved, providing a surviving piece of Sony’s abandoned plans for the PSP. Perhaps further investigation or future server recreation efforts might one day allow more of R∞M to be explored again.

With thanks to Aggevaloz for highlighting the title, Wikipedia and PSP Mav for screenshots.

Download

• https://archive.org/details/PSP_RooM

Video

Gallery

Platforms: Xbox, Nintendo GameCube, PlayStation 2

After failed attempts on the Sega Genesis and Nintendo 64, DC’s favourite main man almost got his modern video game debut. Kemco and Ocean teamed up with DC Comics to adapt the iconic alien bounty hunter into the 6th generation of consoles.

Announced in May 2003, the game was slated for the Xbox, GameCube, and PlayStation 2. Glenn Halseth, Kemco’s VP of Sales and Marketing, promised an action-heavy premise that fit the character perfectly:

“Earn money by eliminating the ten biggest bounties on the world’s most wanted list. Starting at the bottom of the barrel and working his way up, Lobo will fight his way through ten different environments with a ton of different weapons that include knives, chains, guns, grenades, rockets, or hook-chains. As an added bonus, Lobo will even be able to morph into several alternate forms, like those of a ghost, skeleton, or mutant.”

Silence followed the initial reveal, with media outlets repeating the same canned press release. The first sign of trouble came in August 2004, when a user on the official Kemco forums revealed the project was placed on hold. Roughly a year later, the game was officially cancelled.

All that remains in a brief gameplay footage from E3 2003 of Lobo in action; bashing and smashing his way through a level. There’s also a Mercari listing showing a rare promotional material of Lobo and other Kemco games like Rogue Ops, further proving Lobo was closer to hitting the console market had things didn’t go south.

Materials

• Lobo Announce Release rev

Video

Gallery

Jason worked on experimental “memory dive” concepts involving the player and Eve sharing memories. Following our conversation, he dug out his original development archives and has very kindly preserved and released them on GitHub.

The archive includes source code, design notes and playable proof of concept prototypes. These aren’t builds of LMNO itself, but provide a fascinating glimpse at one of the ideas being explored during development.

Huge thanks to Jason Rohrer for taking the time to recover, preserve and share his work.

Links

• https://github.com/jasonrohrer/ea-lmno-packages
• https://github.com/jasonrohrer/ea-lmno

Video

Platform: Commodore Amiga

Czarny Kruk (which translates roughly as ‘Black Raven’) was the working title for a dark graphic adventure that unfortunately never made it properly into production. The project came about following the team’s experience with adventure games such as Kajko i Kokosz and Wacki.

In a video interview looking back at the company’s history, Piotr Kulikiewicz recalled that a group of people approached the team, possibly through an intermediary, with artwork and the idea for a new adventure game. A number of background screens had already been created, with Czarny Kruk being used as the working title for the project.

The backgrounds were all physically painted using oil paints on various materials, including what was described as a type of board or plywood. Three different artists were responsible for producing the screens, which meant there were noticeable differences in both their styles.

The intention was to create a fairly dark adventure featuring an animated main character. Experiments were carried out using a person named Radek, who was filmed wearing a black coat and walking left, right and diagonally in front of a blue sheet. The footage was then reduced in size, transferred into an animation program and coloured, presumably with the intention of placing the character over the hand-painted backgrounds. You can see some of the videos below of the characters and walking video used.

It was a particularly ambitious project, with several dozen background screens planned for the complete adventure. There were concerns however about whether such a large amount of hand-painted artwork could realistically be completed in the timeframe. The artists were recalled as possibly being based in Warsaw, though this particular detail was uncertain from the interview.

Unfortunately, the backgrounds ultimately became the project’s downfall. The development team wanted to have all of the required screens ready before committing themselves to the full production cycle. A scenario had also been proposed, but many of the backgrounds were still unfinished and progress on completing them seems to have slowed everything considerably.

As recalled in the video interview, the team waited and waited for the remaining artwork, but it simply never arrived. Without any confidence that the complete set would eventually be delivered, they couldn’t justify keeping people employed and waiting around when there were other projects to work on. Eventually they had to call time on Czarny Kruk and the game was abandoned.

It was a huge shame as the team had high hopes for the project. From the recollections given, it seems that Czarny Kruk never reached full production, though some artwork existed and the character animation experiments had certainly begun.

Until now, very little from Czarny Kruk has ever been seen publicly. However, in August 2026, Rygar got in touch with Games That Weren’t after obtaining a selection of original development materials directly from the publisher. These include scans of several of the hand-painted backgrounds described by Piotr Kulikiewicz, along with character and animation test material from the abandoned project. We are very happy to be able to share these materials for the first time, providing a fascinating glimpse of how Czarny Kruk was starting to take shape before development came to an end.

With a huge thank you to Rygar for obtaining, preserving and sharing these previously unseen materials with Games That Weren’t, and to Piotr Kulikiewicz for sharing the history of the project in his video interview.

Videos

• bok
• bok1
• bok2
• bokprawo
• przod1
• skos_tyl___2
• tyl1

Video interview

Gallery

1 new entry added

Mindbend

15 Grolier / Mindflight missing titles preserved

Thanks to MalcSeventyFour we were very happy to share 15 previously unpreserved Commodore 64 educational titles from Grolier / Mindflight – which included the long lost Miss Mouse and Rhyme Land titles that we have been searching for recently.

Grolier / Mindflight missing titles

15 updates added

Bubbles, Deathstalker, Dynacomp catalog titles, Miss Mouse, Murder!, Raiders of the Valley of the Kings, Rebelstar 2, Reel Fishing, Rhyme Land, Shanghai Karate 2, Spiders From Mars, The Secrets of Science Island, Vale Of Shadows, Vampyr Motel, World Cup Football