That’s excellent, a great start - thank you. I’ve been playing with the proto and have already found a lot of interesting things. Firstly, all ledges as in the final game are able to be grabbed (TCRF claims this is false) but one has to press up and toward the ledge. Additionally, the final level as Dr Grant is beatable in exactly the same fashion as the final (TCRF also claims this isn’t possible). Presumably, the player didn’t try throwing the flash grenades in place of the final’s explosives to destroy the dinosaur bones. Amongst other things, the height of the T-Rex in the boat level stands out. It suggests that they perhaps wanted to show more of the T-Rex’s body, maybe leading to more being shown toward the end of the game. There’s a song in the sound test called “You Win”, which, coupled with the final game’s text which oddly says “rush to the helicopter”, suggests a concept left out of the final game. There’s also an end game T-Rex boat chase in the sequel, Rampage Edition, which seems to recycle art and concepts from the first, so, yeah. I’ll add to the page at the weekend when I’ve had a bit more time
Crazy Land (Prototype) Frogger II: ThreeeDeep! (Jun 15, 1984 prototype) Galaxy 5000: Racing in the 51st Century (Prototype) Hoops (Prototype) Iron Tank: The Invasion of Normandy (Prototype) R.B.I. Baseball 2 (Mar 7, 1990 prototype) Rally Bike (Prototype B) RoadBlasters (Prototype) Shadow of the Ninja (Oct 16, 1990 prototype) SilkWorm (Prototype) Star Wars: The Arcade Game (Apr 12, 1984 prototype) Discuss this release on our Discord server! Hello everyone! To kick off the holiday season with a blast from the past, we’d like to share with you a slice from the collection of the legendary former Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) editor - Edward J. Semrad! Courtesy of the heroes at the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF). To those who might not be familiar with Ed Semrad or Electronic Gaming Monthly, it was one of the most influential gaming magazines of all time. Founded in 1988 and published by Senai Publications, EGM covered video game news, industry events, game reviews and previews, and more. EGM was note-worthy for being one of the first to have exclusive announcements. They were one of the very few in the industry to make frequent trips to many foreign countries in an attempt to be the earliest to break the news of the upcoming games that were about to be released. Last year, Frank Cifaldi from the Video Game History Foundation was invited to come to digitize Ed’s collection of video game history. Aside from some awesome swag, he collected during his long career in the business, he saved quite a few NES, Atari 2600, and Sega prototypes. We evaluated every ROM dump that Frank provided to see which were prototypes and which were finals, and came up with the list you see above! One of the standouts from our share of the lot is a prototype of the unreleased American localization of “Doki! Doki! Yuuenchi: Crazy Land Daisakusen” known as “Crazy Land”. The game would eventually be released and rebranded only in Europe under the name “The Trolls in Crazyland”. As a special treat, Bock from SMSPower and Tempest from AtariProtos have also shared some more goodies from the same lot as well! Be sure to be on the lookout for them! We’d like to thank Frank Cifaldi from the Video Game History Foundation for digitizing Ed’s collection and for giving us an opportunity to share these with all of you. We’d also like to thank ehw and Hwd45 for researching each of the prototypes for entry onto the site. Please consider donating towards Video Game History Foundation's 2022 Winter Fundraiser. Many people work really hard behind the scenes to make things possible, so please consider contributing this year so that we can make more releases like this possible!
Project Deluge (Lot Page) Project Deluge - Microsoft Xbox 360 (List) Project Deluge - Microsoft Xbox 360 (Matched List) Project Deluge - Nintendo Wii (List) Project Deluge - Nintendo Wii (Matched List) Discuss this release on our Discord server! Merry Christmas, everyone! And a Happy New Year too! It’s been a very long time since the last time we did anything with Project Deluge. The truth is we never stopped working on it, but life always takes its toll and we needed a short break from it all. Continuing with our efforts with Project Deluge, today we present 207 Microsoft Xbox 360 prototypes and 114 Nintendo Wii prototypes! While there aren’t as many unreleased games in this part of the lot, there were many early builds of many games this time around. Have fun!
I'm really happy we got these NiGHTs: Journey of Dreams prototypes. It's the tragedy of mid-late 2000s Sonic Team's development crunch that is never spoken of, so I knew there'd be some pretty big things to come from it relative to the build dates. And in fact that's true; unmixed cutscene audio, synth intro audio + correct pre-rendered video colors, the Elliot and Claris models are just the exact same ones they made for the PS2 version of NiGHTs, some significant goal difference references for some missions... The timeline the game was made on is crazy, and SEGA had no faith in it from the start. 2-3 months makes all the difference, even if the final still has a lot of the stuff you'd usually expect of an earlier build.
Adventures to Go! (Jun 12, 2009 prototype) Atari Classics Evolved (Oct 1, 2007 prototype) Crash: Mind over Mutant (Sep 7, 2008 prototype) Disgaea Infinite (Mar 17, 2010 prototype) Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground (May 9, 2007 prototype) Hammerin' Hero (Nov 28, 2008 prototype) Holy Invasion Of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do To Deserve This? (May 11, 2009 prototype) Mana Khemia: Student Alliance (Dec 9, 2008 prototype) Metal Slug XX (Sep 26, 2009 prototype) Monster Hunter Freedom Unite (Jan 29, 2009 prototype) BlazBlue: Continuum Shift II (Feb 28, 2011 prototype) Warriors Orochi 2 (May 7, 2009 prototype) Discuss this release on our Discord server! Hello everyone! Sorry to keep you waiting since the holidays! We have a few things cooked up for you in the not-so-distant future, but for now, we’d like to share something that will tide you over. We have a few “release candidate” PSP prototypes, builds that are near final but didn’t pass initial certification and needed a second version before being published. These prototypes were brought to you by Jehuty who had a treasure trove of almost 100 UMDs! The games featured in this lot are all the ones that are confirmed to be different from anything released. These were verified using the same technology that helped us with Deluge, so we could confirm that these were all unique builds compared to the Redump set as of writing. The UMDs were dumped by site administrator Sazpaimon using PSP Filer v6.6 on the original hardware. Until next time!
Daredevil: The Man Without Fear (Mar 22, 2004 prototype) Discuss this release on our Discord server! Happy Halloween everyone! It’s been a while, hasn’t it? We apologize for the wait, as we have a couple of projects we are working on that we wanted to spend some time on before working on another article. Over the past several months we got some really nice things to show, so hopefully in the next few months, you’ll get to see some of them. For now, let’s enjoy the spooktacular festivities with a new unreleased game for the Sony PlayStation 2 - Daredevil: The Man Without Fear. Daredevil: The Man Without Fear (originally known as Daredevil: The Video Game during early development) was a third-person beat ‘em up action game based on the Frank Miller Marvel superhero comic of the same name developed by 5,000 Ft. studios. The game was intended to be published by Encore Inc. and was in development for the Sony PlayStation 2, Microsoft Xbox, and PC. We’d like to thank Casuallynoted and an anonymous developer who worked on the game for sending us this prototype! A huge special thanks to SolidSnake11 for taking a crack at fixing the game so that it could be made playable.
6GUN (May 31, 2005 prototype) Discuss this release on our Discord server! Happy Thanksgiving! Today we present yet another unreleased game for Sony’s PlayStation 2 - BattleBorne Entertainment’s lost title - 6GUN, courtesy of goilup and Cereth who were kind enough to share this with us! Originally announced for Xbox, PlayStation 2, and PC, 6Gun is a military-themed third-person tactical shooter spread across four missions and 12 planned levels. You lead a group of “GUNSLINGERS”, a classified military unit under SOCOM, ordered to find a missing secondary group of GUNSLINGERS in complete secrecy. The game was to emphasize tactical decision-making by utilizing small unit combat in various situations such as hostage rescue, demolition, and snipping from helicopter gunship. The game was announced with a planned release for 2006. Aside from a few screenshots, this was all the information there was on the game itself. A port on the PlayStation Portable (PSP) was also announced later sometime in May of 2005 with a planned release in the Summer of 2006, presumably following the same gameplay offerings as its console ports. However, BattleBorne itself would close up shop sometime in early 2006, resulting in all projects being canceled. Aside from a few screenshots, there were no other tidbits of information about any of the ongoing projects at BattleBorne after the release of Combat Elite: WWII Paratroopers. Like most unreleased games, the game had a moment in the spotlight and disappeared into obscurity never to be seen ever again...until recently that is! Enjoy!
