General Questions and Information Thread

The Japanese Wikipedia has lists of unreleased games. I've taken their lists and filtered out the games we know exist, and this is what we're left with:

https://segaretro.org/Sega_Retro:Todo/Unreleased
(scroll down)

or if your mouse if broken:

No I haven't fully translated it, because I'm lazy.

Some of these games definitely existed, and will get pages at some point. Others need more research, and because it's Wikipedia, I expect a good number to be flat out wrong.


If anyone finds any details in any of the many magazine scans we host, that would be super helpful.

 

A good chunk of those were easily provable:

Altein
Dennin Aleste 2

Dobro i Zlo
Obelisk: Project Oscar Suikou Seyo!
Puyo Korogashi
Real Sound 2: Kiri no Orugouru
Rensa
Wärrz

Crack 2
Harukaze Sentai V-Force 2
Hiryu no Ken Retsuden
Julian
Oozumou
Pro Shinan Mahjong "Tsuwamono" DX
Shienryu 2


and some others came along for the ride:

Alex: Virus Composer
Chen Wen no Sangokushi
Dynamite Robo
VJ Monster




You were *that* close to having a Sega Saturn game who's official title used the Cyrillic alphabet.

Anyway of these, there's only one title that stands out:



"Let's make a 5000-player MMORPG on the Saturn"

Yep, okay, sure.

 

Courtesy of CBS 8 San Diego, there's been an upload of a 1977 news clip about the Sega Center that was in the Fashion Valley Shopping Center. What's fascinating about the clip is that it has actual gameplay footage of Sega's discrete logic arcade games from around the time, including Heavyweight Champ, Bomber and Road Race, as well as Sega's final electro-mechanical arcade game Plinker's Canyon!

The clip can be viewed here:

 

Shenmue the Animation Episode 10, "Comeback":


Same shit, different angle. Different colors though.

 

Arena (Saturn)
Fantasy Earth (probably something else)
Gendai Daisenryaku Strikes
Ike! Inachuu Takkyuubu
Pachinko Club
Raindrops
Rauni Fiction (name probably wrong)
Shinbatsu Jinsei no Imi
Shinzui Taikyoku Igo Go Sennin
Success Story
Super 301 S.Q.
US Drag Champ

Animastar Puzzle
Jahmong 2
Renai Mahjong Melty School
V.R. Mahjong


and others:
Mysterious Tarot
TIZ: Tokyo Insect School

Digital Keiba Shinbun 2
K-1 Dream
Saint Poppins (name probably wrong)

Guess the Japanese are just as good at "not releasing games" as we are. These were all listed in Sega's catalogues - I have no idea if any of them are interesting.

 

Chou Flappy‎
Dream Square Yamada Mariya‎
Edward Randy Arcade Gears‎
Fansform‎ (name probably wrong)
Game Nihonshi: Tenka Hito Hideyoshi to Ieyasu‎
Gekitou Ottama ga Eru‎
J.League Excite Stage V1‎
Kamome Daisakusen Megami-tachi no Sasayaki‎
Kisen Kaizoku‎
Off-road‎
Requiem‎
The Ruins‎
Synchronicity‎
Virtua Park: The Fish‎

Air Commander‎
Dragon Knight 4‎
Guilty Gear‎
Money Puzzle Exchanger‎
Ongaku Tsukuuru Kana de Ichiru 2‎
Prism Court‎
Pururun! with Shape Up Girl‎
SNK Fan-CD Kaku Oukami Densetsu Hen‎
Snow Queen‎
Startling Odyssey I: Blue Evolution‎
Startling Odyssey II: Maryuu Sensou‎
Startling Odyssey III: Millennium no Ryousen‎
Tokyo Maboroshi Yume Daigaku‎
Uchuu no Rendezvous‎
Virtual Theater‎
Words‎


Over the course of a weekend I have been able to confirm at least 70 unreleased Sega games existed in some form. For this batch, credits go to this 1997 catalogue.

what am i doing with my life

 

Went through the first year and a half of Beep! MegaDrive, and got to here before the text became too small for the OCR software to work.

F-1 Constructors
Phildias: Kaze no Chinkonka
Ushiwakamaru Saburouta Monogatari: 24-jikan Tatakaemasu ka?

Also found Dream Island which might have become something else. Actually to be honest there's a few vague titles like "Heli Fighter" (ヘリファイター) and "Reds"(??) (レッズ) in these lists that sound like temporary names - I don't feel qualified to say if these were cancelled projects. Others like Ultraman - GDRI says it was delayed by two years, but I'm seeing it listed in 1990... which would make three. There's too many variables.

Of the games people are more likely to care about:

Power Drift was supposed to come to the Mega Drive, maybe as early as 1989. That would have been an early technical feat had it arrived.

Dynamite Dux was also penciled in for a Mega Drive release, which would have meant you could play as cartoon blue duck on the Mega Drive before a cartoon blue hedgehog (ignoring backwards compatibility).

Speaking of Sonic, the first game was originally due for April 1991 before being delayed. No games were hitting their original deadlines so this isn't unusual, but Sonic 2 wasn't afforded such freedoms. Incidentally I'd quite like to log "planned release dates" for games somewhere, so we can visualise how much the deadlines slipped, but that would require someone copy-editing every release schedule ever put to print. I could add it to my automatic development timelines.

 

This was also mentioned in UK mags, I waited a long time for that to never come out, and eventually got the PC Engine version.

This is something I've wanted to suggest, we already do it for unreleased games, but going through and fixing DC US & UK dates (should be >90% accurate now, with vast majority of others within a week or two) I noticed some games getting pushed back for an eternity before getting released. I did leave the old dates in comments in the edit page, so they can be added to planned release dates easily enough. I'm currently doing the same for Saturn. For Japanese dates, Beep started giving a monthly schedule in early 1986, Famitsu started giving a regular bi-weekly schedule for Sega games from 1988, with weekly schedules from 1991. I will transcribe these at some point, probably after 1988 Famitsus get scanned. Incidentally, from looking at the schedules + Sega sales charts in Beep and Famitsu we can see that many of Sega's official dates for SMS games are wrong, some by more than a year (also confirmed by copyright date). Waiting for 1988 Famitsus until I attempt to fix that mess.

Computer Entertainer had a monthly US release schedule for SMS throughout the 80s. They were pretty good at reporting on date changes, cancellations, even rom size changes. I documented every schedule change for SMS from there here.

Another suggestion would be to have release dates for "Non-Sega versions". Whilst working on the US Saturn dates I've noticed that whilst it's more common for the Playstation version to release first, there are quite a few examples of the Saturn version coming first, it would be useful to be able to see which was the lead platform.

 

This could get complicated - would we just go for the earliest release, or want to document every release from every part of the world? And then is the RRP important... or developers and publishers... and what if the SNES ROM was bigger so they could put more stuff in that version of the game.

From what I understand, Wikipedia solves some of these problems with the Wikidata project, which all about inter-wiki data storage, letting all the translated versions of a page have the same numbers. I would very much like to have something similar on Retro CDN - just a load of raw facts, which could then be recalled on Sega Retro.


The problem is I haven't seen a Retro admin in months.


But I can probably cook something up for "missed release dates". We need a solution for unreleased game dates anyway because the auto-generated tables go a bit screwy with some.

Maybe something like

Code (Text):

1. {{MissedReleases|MD|
2. {{MissedRelease|JP|1993-01-01}}
3. {{MissedRelease|JP|1994-07}}
4. }}

dunno

 

I guess ideally we would have the same data as we have for releases on Sega platforms, but on a practical level it's unlikely that we'll have accurate dates outside of Japan, US, and UK.

Also, footage of unreleased Mega CD game Flying Nightmares.

 

https://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File:Mdfan_JP_1991-06.pdf&page=132

Something else to consider - in addition to listing release schedules, Mega Drive Fan has (what looks like) a "percentage complete" rating for various unfinished games. EGM did this too for a while - I'm not sure you can rely on the precise numbers, but a rough idea of how games were progressing might give clues as to why some were scrapped.

Case in point, this issue is suggesting development hadn't even started on F-1 Constructors by April/May 1991, but it was turning up in the schedules as early as January. That tells me straight away that the project wasn't much of a priority at Sega.

 

I'm going to run out of time to do this today, but

https://archive.org/details/IE_Interactive_Entertainment_CD_ROM_EPISODE06

Made even more fun by the fact there are multiple issues covering Sega-related things, including 32X reviews.

EDIT:


tomorrow

 

If it had been released it would cost 10.990$00 escudos in Portugal (roughly 55 Euros) ... Ecofilmes mailed those catalogues to Clube Sega members every three months... that's the Christmas 1995 catalogue and it was mailed in that year in late summer/ early fall (September/October)...

https://segaretro.org/index.php?tit...rteSega_Christmas_95_PT_Catalogue.pdf&page=13

 

We'll need a better solution for this:

https://retrocdn.net/File:IE_06_FLNM.zip

This is everything Flying Nightmares-related on the disc. Kinda. If you run the disc the proper way, there's a user interface layer on top where you can show system specs and the the script in text form, but in this case, it's a quick preview so there's not much to see.

You'll also find that these AVIs don't work properly in modern versions of Windows because old codecs are old. You'd have to spend a more time and effort than I'm willing to do to document the contents of these discs properly, and short of completely re-creating IE's software, you're still going to be better off running the disc in a Windows 95 machine as originally intended.


There's a Sonic 3 feature in one of the earlier CDs... but don't go expecting prototype footage:


This clip better illustrates this series - cheesy voiceover, low quality AVIs, still screenshots and (yes really) ad breaks. Later issues only seem to be concerned with PC software.

 

I got somewhere with this, but had to change my plan a couple of times, and I'm not super confident with what I've created:

Template:MissedReleases

The displaying of data needs a rethink, but the storage is relatively sound. Basically the proposal would be to change this:

Code (Text):

1. | date={{MD}} 1995-09{{magref|cvg|165|48}}, 1995-11{{magref|segamaguk|21|20}}{{magref|topconsoles|6|32}}, 1996-01{{magref|gamepro|78|58}}, 1996-02{{magref|sv|25|100}}, 1996-05{{ref|https://web.archive.org/web/19970122074549/http://www.cuttingedgeent.com/genlist.html}} {{SAT}} 1995-12{{magref|sv|25|100}}, 1996-01{{magref|gamepro|78|58}}, 1996-06-28{{magref|cvg|176|49}}, 1996-07-18{{magref|cvg|177|53}}, 1996-10{{magref|ssm|10|16}}, 1996-11{{magref|ugameplayers|90|79}}

into this:

Code (Text):

1. | date={{MissedRelease|MD|1995-09{{magref|cvg|165|48}}}}
2. {{MissedRelease|MD|1995-11{{magref|segamaguk|21|20}}{{magref|topconsoles|6|32}}}}
3. {{MissedRelease|MD|1996-01{{magref|gamepro|78|58}}}}
4. {{MissedRelease|MD|1996-02{{magref|sv|25|100}}}}
5. {{MissedRelease|MD|1996-05{{ref|https://web.archive.org/web/19970122074549/http://www.cuttingedgeent.com/genlist.html}}}}
6.  
7. {{MissedRelease|SAT|1995-12{{magref|sv|25|100}}}}
8. {{MissedRelease|SAT|1996-01{{magref|gamepro|78|58}}}}
9. {{MissedRelease|SAT|1996-06-28{{magref|cvg|176|49}}}}
10. {{MissedRelease|SAT|1996-07-18{{magref|cvg|177|53}}}}
11. {{MissedRelease|SAT|1996-10{{magref|ssm|10|16}}}}
12. {{MissedRelease|SAT|1996-11{{magref|ugameplayers|90|79}}}}

There's also an optional "region" argument, so you can do {{MissedRelease|SAT|1996-10|region=US}}.

The results are stored here:
https://segaretro.org/Special:CargoTables/missedreleases

I've built it into Template:UnreleasedBob, so unreleased games can be covered. I do not have a clean solution for normal games yet - do we want something in the Bob template, or a new template, or do we want these details declared on Development sub-pages? Is there a better solution entirely?

Also it only currently works with Master System, Mega Drive and Saturn games, because I've hard-coded things and nothing's set in stone.

 

It would make more sense to have them on dev pages if the game was released but we wouldn't want that for the unreleased pages though.

 

They seem to play OK on VLC media player, on Linux at least, but should be the same on Windows. I'm not sure if they come as standard, but if IIRC VLC player can detect which codec is required and download them, but it's been a long time since I had to do that.

The videos are encoded at 15fps, which is why they look a bit choppy. The Mega CD version has a lot of similarities to The Kremlin's port of Mig-29 on Mega Drive, so it seems that they used that engine as a base. The big difference is that whilst they retain the polygons of Mig-29 for objects, they use the Mega CD ASIC for the terrain, à la Thunderhawk II. This is now my #1 wanted Mega CD proto (previous was Myst), I'm not sure any other games tried to push the Mega CD like this. Also, here's a trade leaflet for the game, I would guess from 1994 Summer CES.

 

I agree, but what about games which released in one region, but ended up getting cancelled in another region?

 

There's also AV-8B Harrier Assault to consider - I never got around to checking whether that was a distinctly different game.

Another unrelated flight sim mystery is an apparently scrapped Mega Drive version of F-19 Stealth Fighter by MicroProse - there's some noise about some of F-19's missions being shoehorned into console versions of F-15 Strike Eagle II (maybe to compenate for not having a full release?).


It's really difficult to distinguish between "yes we're bringing this game to the Mega Drive and have written code" and "well the console's a bit like an Amiga so it'll probably happen" somtimes.

 

Yeah, I was intending to look into that too. I've seen Flying Nightmares on Mac referred to as a port of AV-8B Harrier Assault, but elsewhere it's referred to as an evolution of it. Needs more research ... but flight sims were never my thing, so not sure I want to spend a lot of time playing them both.