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The Games That Weren't
Now larger than both the movie and music industries combined, the video game industry has provided more than 40 glorious years of interactive entertainment across a plethora of hardware platforms, including consoles, computers and handheld devices. We truly are spoiled for choice when it comes to picking something to play, and that dizzying degree of choice is growing by the day.
Even so, there are a great many video games which have sadly never seen the light of day for a variety of reasons – and many of these have incredible mysteries and gripping tales attached to them, both unsolved and untold. The Games That Weren't aims to lift the lid on these stories and give these unknown titles a chance to shine – even if we weren't able to actually play them as their developers intended.
Giving an illustrated snapshot of a wide range of unreleased games between the years of 1975 and 2015 and covering systems from the Atari 2600 right up to the Sony PlayStation 4, The Games That Weren't is the biggest book Bitmap Books has ever created and includes titles across a variety of arcade, home computer, console, handheld and mobile platforms. Years in the making, it's packed to bursting point with exclusive content, in-depth interviews and much more besides.
Many of these lost classics are expanded upon in exceptional detail, with those involved with their design and development sharing their untold stories and recollections – as well as shedding some light on intriguing mysteries along the way. Assets and screenshots – some of which have never been seen until now – help illustrate the narratives, and in the case of games for which no images exist, there are specially-created artist's impressions which give a tantalising visual interpretation of what could have been.
Covering more than 80 games – including Star Fox 2, Green Lantern and SimMars – across a 40-year span and packed with content such as five specially-created 'Hardware That Wasn't' blueprint pieces and interviews with industry legends such as David Crane, Jeff Minter, Matthew Smith, Dan Malone, Eugene Jarvis, Dylan Cuthbert, Andrew and Philip Oliver, Geoff Crammond, Scott Adams, Jon Hare and many more, The Games That Weren't showcases and pays tribute to well-known and not so well-known unreleased titles, as well as games you might never have heard of – until now. As if that wasn't enough, the book has been produced to the traditional high standard Bitmap Books readers have come to expect, with eye-catching fluorescent colours and high-quality binding on superb paper stock, and comes with a free digital copy so you can take it with you everywhere.
While the games industry has much to celebrate, there's something uniquely captivating in looking at titles that never made it to the finish line – and The Games That Weren't will hopefully keep the memory of these failed masterpieces alive.
Book specifications:
644 pages, 170mm x 210mm. Lithographic print. Hardback. Sewn binding. Coloured bookmark ribbon. Special fluorescent ink throughout. Shrink wrapped.
Detailed features cover games such as:
Sebring (Arcade), The Last Ninja (Atari 800/130XE, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, Tandy Colour Computer 3 and ZX Spectrum 48K), Solar Jetman (Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga 500 and ZX Spectrum 128K), Chips Challenge (Nintendo Entertainment System), Green Lantern (Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, SEGA Mega Drive and Super Nintendo), Rolling Thunder (Atari Lynx), Virtual Tank (Nintendo Virtual Boy), Deathwatch (Atari Jaguar), Star Fox 2 (Super Nintendo), Ridge Racer (PC), SimMars (Apple Macintosh and PC), Half-Life (Nintendo GameCube and SEGA Dreamcast), Stunt Car Racer Pro (Microsoft Xbox, PC and Sony PlayStation 2), Eye of the Moon (Apple iOS) plus many more...
Even so, there are a great many video games which have sadly never seen the light of day for a variety of reasons – and many of these have incredible mysteries and gripping tales attached to them, both unsolved and untold. The Games That Weren't aims to lift the lid on these stories and give these unknown titles a chance to shine – even if we weren't able to actually play them as their developers intended.
Giving an illustrated snapshot of a wide range of unreleased games between the years of 1975 and 2015 and covering systems from the Atari 2600 right up to the Sony PlayStation 4, The Games That Weren't is the biggest book Bitmap Books has ever created and includes titles across a variety of arcade, home computer, console, handheld and mobile platforms. Years in the making, it's packed to bursting point with exclusive content, in-depth interviews and much more besides.
Many of these lost classics are expanded upon in exceptional detail, with those involved with their design and development sharing their untold stories and recollections – as well as shedding some light on intriguing mysteries along the way. Assets and screenshots – some of which have never been seen until now – help illustrate the narratives, and in the case of games for which no images exist, there are specially-created artist's impressions which give a tantalising visual interpretation of what could have been.
Covering more than 80 games – including Star Fox 2, Green Lantern and SimMars – across a 40-year span and packed with content such as five specially-created 'Hardware That Wasn't' blueprint pieces and interviews with industry legends such as David Crane, Jeff Minter, Matthew Smith, Dan Malone, Eugene Jarvis, Dylan Cuthbert, Andrew and Philip Oliver, Geoff Crammond, Scott Adams, Jon Hare and many more, The Games That Weren't showcases and pays tribute to well-known and not so well-known unreleased titles, as well as games you might never have heard of – until now. As if that wasn't enough, the book has been produced to the traditional high standard Bitmap Books readers have come to expect, with eye-catching fluorescent colours and high-quality binding on superb paper stock, and comes with a free digital copy so you can take it with you everywhere.
While the games industry has much to celebrate, there's something uniquely captivating in looking at titles that never made it to the finish line – and The Games That Weren't will hopefully keep the memory of these failed masterpieces alive.
Book specifications:
644 pages, 170mm x 210mm. Lithographic print. Hardback. Sewn binding. Coloured bookmark ribbon. Special fluorescent ink throughout. Shrink wrapped.
Detailed features cover games such as:
Sebring (Arcade), The Last Ninja (Atari 800/130XE, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, Tandy Colour Computer 3 and ZX Spectrum 48K), Solar Jetman (Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga 500 and ZX Spectrum 128K), Chips Challenge (Nintendo Entertainment System), Green Lantern (Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, SEGA Mega Drive and Super Nintendo), Rolling Thunder (Atari Lynx), Virtual Tank (Nintendo Virtual Boy), Deathwatch (Atari Jaguar), Star Fox 2 (Super Nintendo), Ridge Racer (PC), SimMars (Apple Macintosh and PC), Half-Life (Nintendo GameCube and SEGA Dreamcast), Stunt Car Racer Pro (Microsoft Xbox, PC and Sony PlayStation 2), Eye of the Moon (Apple iOS) plus many more...
644 pages, Hardcover
Published September 4, 2020
19 people are currently reading
229 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 2, 2020
An excellent, if enormous, look at games that were started, but never completed. The author is British, so there's a real tilt towards the UK games industry (possibly due to access to developers, but who knows). This does lead to some frustrating sections, where a canceled port of a game that barely made a blip in North America is given an exhaustive expose across 10+ pages, while major North American titles such as Interplay's Van Buren/Fallout 3 get only two paragraphs. Blizzard's legendary Starcraft: Ghost only rates an honorable mention, with nothing at all of WarCraft Adventures or Titan. Considering that this is a 700-something page book, those seem especially egregious omissions, considering how much information is out there.
Still, I did very much enjoy reading most of what did make the grade. It's surprisingly technical at times, and if you're the kind of nerd who enjoys hearing about technical challenges in game development, you'll find a lot to love here.
Highly recommended, but certain chapters will likely get a skim from most readers.
Still, I did very much enjoy reading most of what did make the grade. It's surprisingly technical at times, and if you're the kind of nerd who enjoys hearing about technical challenges in game development, you'll find a lot to love here.
Highly recommended, but certain chapters will likely get a skim from most readers.
October 23, 2023
As a lifelong videogame nerd, my discovery of The Games That Weren't website was serendipitous. While I was personally only aware of a handful of cancelled games from the 80s, I was instantly hooked on the idea of a whole hidden history of games that never reached a publishable state. For preference, though, I tend to read offline, so the dead-tree version was a must-have.
The book is pretty hefty - over 640 pages - and, naturally, the amount of detail for each entry is variable: some are still covered by nondisclosure agreements, some are just from so far back, or were such contentious projects, those involved have only sketchy recollections. Many of the entries are accompanied by "artist's impressions" of what the finished game may have looked like, while others feature concept art, handwritten notes and other treasures. The longer entries are broken up by shorter stories set across a double-page spread.
While it's never less than fascinating, the layout of the text makes reading some of the longer entries a bit of a chore, and the use of pull quotes is often quite bizarre: they're run across the full page width, like the main blocks of text, but frequently don't relate to anything on the page they appear. Entries can be pages and pages of nothing but text, followed by a handful of pages of art, and I feel that it might have looked better to have some images interspersed within the text, rather than keeping them separate.
Nevertheless, the stories behind some of these Games That Weren't can be heartbreaking, frustrating, or downright ridiculous, and the experiences of those involved in development reflect the passion they had - and in many cases, still have - for their work.
The book is pretty hefty - over 640 pages - and, naturally, the amount of detail for each entry is variable: some are still covered by nondisclosure agreements, some are just from so far back, or were such contentious projects, those involved have only sketchy recollections. Many of the entries are accompanied by "artist's impressions" of what the finished game may have looked like, while others feature concept art, handwritten notes and other treasures. The longer entries are broken up by shorter stories set across a double-page spread.
While it's never less than fascinating, the layout of the text makes reading some of the longer entries a bit of a chore, and the use of pull quotes is often quite bizarre: they're run across the full page width, like the main blocks of text, but frequently don't relate to anything on the page they appear. Entries can be pages and pages of nothing but text, followed by a handful of pages of art, and I feel that it might have looked better to have some images interspersed within the text, rather than keeping them separate.
Nevertheless, the stories behind some of these Games That Weren't can be heartbreaking, frustrating, or downright ridiculous, and the experiences of those involved in development reflect the passion they had - and in many cases, still have - for their work.
January 17, 2022
Like Jason Schreier’s ‘Blood, Sweat, and Pixels’, this book reminds me that every video game that is released is an absolute miracle. Spanning 40 years between 1975 and 2015, The Games That Weren’t chronicles 90 games and 5 systems in various stages of production (from the planning stage all the way to being completed) that were never released for myriad reasons. Some of these games sounded pretty awesome and I can’t for the life of me understand why anybody would cancel them, while the cancelation of others is painfully obvious. Many of these games are thankfully playable, either on other systems they were released on (e.g. you can’t play Half-Life on the Dreamcast, but you can play it on PC and PS2), or thanks to released source code.
Gasking and his contributors did a remarkable job putting all this together, and even making the techie stuff easy to understand. I enjoyed most of the stories as told by the various creators who worked on the games, and appreciated their candor.
This was a fascinating look at a part of video game history that is often overlooked, and it’s inspired me to go check out the full website (and maybe even try my hand at some bedroom coding of my own).
Gasking and his contributors did a remarkable job putting all this together, and even making the techie stuff easy to understand. I enjoyed most of the stories as told by the various creators who worked on the games, and appreciated their candor.
This was a fascinating look at a part of video game history that is often overlooked, and it’s inspired me to go check out the full website (and maybe even try my hand at some bedroom coding of my own).
January 29, 2021
History is written by winners but sometimes the more interesting stories tend to be the ones of failure. This is where this beautiful book comes into play: "The Games that weren´t" covers all sort of unreleased games on nearly all platforms from 1975 to 2015 (featuring even obscure ones like the Gizmondo). You get to know the background story of the development process and learn why it failed. You even get the info whether the prototype is available to play knowadays and also get some mockup graphics of the games supposed look if nothing is available anymore. All the stories are based on a blog https://www.gamesthatwerent.com so check out wether this 644 page coffee table book is something for your or your studio.
July 19, 2021
Extremely detailed and exhaustive (I’d say often exhausting) look at cancelled games throughout the years. Beautifully designed and clearly a labour of love but very jargon-y and clearly aimed at a specialised audience which I’m not.
July 31, 2025
Whilst not quite as well presented as many of the other Bitmap Books, this work provides a fascinating trawl through the history of games that never saw the light of day (at least officially).
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews