Yes, this has been a royal mess. The (unpublished) company was intended to show that a game such as
X-Men was in fact a w.i.p. by Adv. Intl. So if you clicked on AI, the game would turn up in the listing, but clearly be displayed as non-existant.
An entirely new category, Publishing status, is a neat idea but not going to happen (any time soon, at least)
Anyway, too many categories. Fortunately, Hannes has made an excellent batch update tool, so I've already made the following changes.
- We now only have two relevant genres, (lost game) and (unreleased game)
- (lost game) covers all games that might actually be lost. That is, games that are known to have existed as well as games that we're uncertain of (the "vaporware" ones). Until proven otherwise, they are all lost.
- (unreleased game) covers all games that we know were never completed. Ideally this list should never grow very long. It's basically for the more notable titles which are by prolific authors or part of an existing series.
I haven't updated the (unreleased) list yet, but quite a lot of them need to be moved to the (lost) list, as we don't know if they were written or not.
How does that sound?
Oh.... regarding Sword of the Samurai. Is it 100% certain it wasn't released? The entry doesn't say so.