It seems that finally an organization is going to seriously work in collaboration with developers to try to preserve the games that could be lost forever. As we can read on their website “The National Videogame Archive is a joint project between the National Media Museum and Nottingham Trent University, which aims to celebrate that culture and preserve that history for researchers, developers, game fans and the public”. With the Save The Videogame campaign they are trying to “encourage a debate about what games are, what they mean to the people who play them, and what elements of them should be preserved” […] “Consoles, cartridges, discs, and tapes gather dust in lofts. Crucial prototypes get thrown away when studios go bust, rare versions of classic games are lost forever. Every day, we lose another little bit of our history.” Will they be able to save prototypes and share media from cancelled games? We sure hope so! U64 is just a little group of geeks and we cant really do much, but if a serious organization will be able to keep up with a project like this, more unseen games could be saved. Good luck TNVA!
Illusion Of Gaia / Time [SNES – Beta / Unused Stuff]
Arcane on the X-Cult forum, has posted a weird screen from an early build of Illusion of Gaia (Illusion of Time in Europe), that shows some sprites unused in the final version of the game. You can read the full topic at x-cult: Illusion of Gaia head? It seems that there’s even a beta version of the game that has been leaked online, with a different title screen, different translation, names and more stuff.
Thanks to Robert Seddon we know that the title screen (based on the Japanese title screen; completely different versions were used in the final Western releases) calls it Soul Blazer: Illusion of Gaia, whereas no officially released version of the game identifies Soul Blazer as a related game. (See HG101 for the links between S.B. and I.o.G.).
Adrien BAPTIS has made us notice about 3 beta / unused items that can be found in the ROM of the game via Action replay. (Note :names from the french version)
7E0AB405 = Mélodie Maya
(Description in-game : “Conseil du père: voir les Mayas avec la mélodie”)
7E0AB415 = Journal bleu
(Description in-game : “Journal trouvé dans l’âtre”)
7E0AB41B = Sac d’or
(Description in-game : “Récompense du Gobelet Russe”)
Jesse shared with us some more info on these unused items:
One is an un-used melody.
Another is a sac of gold.
The last one is a travel journal. I remember hearing it was Olman’s (Will’s father.)
The sac of gold of the journal were hidden behind a chimney, if I remember correctly.
If you have more infos on the beta version of Illusion Of Gaia, please let us know
Thanks to Adrien Baptis, Robert Seddon and Jesse for the contributions!
Images:
Videos:
Happy Camper [NES – Unreleased]
Lost Levels has recently talked about an interesting discovery: a working proto of Happy Camper, an unreleased platform / action game that was in development by Color Dreams for the NES. It seems that the game was too hard to play.. and after some changes in the difficulty level options, it was already too late to release the title with a decent economic margin. You can check the original story at Lost Levels for more infos and screens!
Thanks to NGD for the additional screenshots!
More infos: NGD & Happy Camper Interview
Images:
Battle Chess [CD-I – Cancelled]
ENG: This entry in the archive doesn’t have a description yet. If you want to add some info about the beta / cancelled stuff that you see in these images, just write a comment or send us an email! We’ll add your info in this page and your name in the contributors list. Thanks a lot for your help! :)
ITA: Questa pagina dell’archivio non ha ancora una descrizione. Se vuoi aggiungere delle informazioni riguardo le differenze della beta o la descrizione di un gioco cancellato, lasciaci un commento o mandaci una email! Inseriremo le tue informazioni nella pagina ed il tuo nome nella lista dei collaboratori. Grazie per il tuo aiuto! :)
Source: cdinteractive Youtube Channel
Video:
More cancelled games from Brash Entertainment?
A news on Gamespot from some days ago talked about the financial troubles that are going on at Brash Entertainment: over 20 employees will be laying off and they are looking to ditch rights for a bunch of unfinished games that were currently in development. Superman (by Factor 5?), Tale of Desperaux, Prison Break, Night at the Museum 2, Clash of the Titans and 300 could be cancelled if they dont find any other publishers that would like to release them. More games for the Unseen Archive? Most of those projects are based on movie and TV properties, but we dont have any screens or videos from the gaming versions yet..