Hi, thanks for taking the time to answer our questions.
Hello, and no problem :)
How did you get the idea of making "gtw" and when?
GTW was the product of inspiration when I first read an article called "That Was The Game That Wasn't" in Commodore Force magazine 1993, written by Ian Osbourne. This article had box-out's of various unreleased games and the whole idea really interested me. I wanted to try and play some of these lost titles which looked ever so good in the screenshots. When writing for a fanzine called Commodore Zone (1996-2000), I was trying to come up with article ideas, and one was an article called "Games That Weren't" (Name suggested by Jason 'Kenz' Mackenzie) which ran for about 8 installments. The article was quite popular, and once I entered the world of internet, my friend Vinny Mainolfi suggested doing an online version with reviews. Once on the net however, I started to find one or two titles (which happened to be released), and it was then I realised that this would be a fantastic project to set up and actually dig out lost games. And it kind of grew from there. 2003 saw a relaunch of the site, and now its a full project which takes a lot of my free time up.
How much time do you have to invest to keep finding games that regularly?
I spent a little bit of time each day doing research, emails, reviews etc. At the moment, in my spare few minutes at work I quickly write up a game entry in a text editor, which builds up over the week and gives me material to turn into HTML pages, and eventually a site update each week. Research can take time, and if we have particularly strong leads to a game, we'll concentrate fully on it. Generally we pick a few titles out to search for one week, and get emailing and surfing the web for various bits of information and clues. I just put as much time as I have free, and when particularly i'm in the right mood.
Is there any broken game out there you heard of which would be the most pleasant to you to find and offer for download?
Hmmm... a broken game?.... if you mean a game which was never finished, then I would probably say Putty or Search For Sharla. I would love to see the remains of both of these games found. If you mean any unreleased game in general (complete/uncomplete), then it would be Daffy Duck or Murder.
Perhaps most difficult of all: how do you find "games that weren't"?
First of all we try and find out who the actual developers of the game in question are by looking through code for hidden comments, asking other employees and searching magazines and the internet. Once we have names, then we start searching for the people behind the game and their email/postal address. Once found, we then start showing our interest in their past C64 work and about the title in question... digging for as much information as we can. This eventually leads onto us asking if they have a copy still, which sadly is "no" most of the time.... then its trying to chase other possible leads, such as other developers and even the publisher who might have the masters still! We only stop when we are 100% certain a game is lost.
Ok, so one last question: what can we expect in the future? Is there still potential out there which has not been discovered yet?
I At the moment we are well over 600 game entries, whenthere are actually 1000's of unreleased C64 games that we haven't covered. Constantly we are learning of other titles to add and search for, its gonna be a big struggle to do all this searching! :) So certainly you can expect plenty more titles to learn about and more journeys to follow as we try and find them. We should have some luck along the way and find some of them too, but you'll just have to keep checking to see if we have had some luck :) Certainly at the moment we've got a very big finding to announce, and some other goodies... but this is underwraps for now :)