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Marble Madness II is the unreleased sequel to the classic Marble Madness. It was developed in 1991 by Atari Games and underwent market testing in a variety of locations, but these were deemed a failure so the game was cancelled and never released.
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The Atari 8-Bit version of Commando was developed by Sculptured Software for Data East in 1989, but unfortunately the game was never released. Thankfully a prototype still exists and is available online, which is good because this is one of the best 8-bit ports of Commando around.
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A game that should need no introduction: Pac-Man is one of the most popular video games, and one of the most popular video game characters, of all-time. Unfortunately, this ColecoVision port of Pac-Man never made it market and was cancelled before release. Thankfully a completed prototype of the game exists and has been leaked online, and it’s better than most other ports on competitor machines.
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The NES version of The Adventures of Dr. Franken was developed by Cygnus in 1993 and was cancelled before release. A prototype exists online, though, which is what these grabs are from.
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There is a story behind the Commodore 64 conversion of Bubbler, but to condense it into just a few sentences: the game was being converted in 1987 by an intermediary company for Ultimate, called Lynsoft, but was canned before release because it wasn’t fast enough.
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This BBC Micro conversion of Ultimate Play the Game‘s classic 1983 Spectrum game, Cookie, was programmed by Paul Proctor but was never officially released. Which is shame because it’s not bad.
It was, however, leaked onto the internet some decades later and we can still enjoy playing it now. Which is a damn sight better than the game having been lost forever…
Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors is a “legendary” game that never came out…
Originally planned for a 1995 release on the Sega CD, Smoke and Mirrors was due to be published by Absolute Entertainment but they went out of business before the game’s release and it therefore sank without a trace.
Developed by Software Creations for Sales Curve Interactive, Solar Jetman is a legendary ‘lost’ game that was canned by its publisher in 1991 and has since resurfaced and been ‘preserved’ online.
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Lode Runner on the Atari Lynx was developed but never officially released. A prototype version was leaked onto the internet in 2008.
It’s pretty much complete in terms of gameplay – all 150 original levels have been verified as being in there and the game plays as it should, without any real problems.
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The retro games community got excited recently when two development cartridges from a cancelled version of Resident Evil for the Game Boy Color were found and dumped by some shadowy, anonymous people.
Was the excitement worth it?
The King of Grabs 