Games That Weren’t Needs YOU! Unreleased Megadrive games need tracking down

Despite our best efforts there are times when our searches for unreleased games prove fruitless. It is at times like this we publish what information we do have in the hope that one of our intrepid and fabulous readers takes up the baton and succeeds where we failed. Sadly, we’ve reached this point once more.

We’ve been looking into three or four games that are unreleased, some with a fair amount of information and other’s with next to nothing. We’ve published every we now underneath but unless some new information comes to light it’s the end of the road for these games.

Monster Truck Wars

Monster Truck Wars was actually released back in the 1990s…for the Game Gear and Game Boy. A Megadrive version was planned and indeed we even know the person who did it. Mike Crandall has his own website and among the list of games he worked on he reveals that he developed the Sega Genesis version of Monster Truck Wars. We’ve contacted him but sadly got no reply.

This isn’t a plea for you to pester the poor guy, he’s probably got a life, unlike us. But unless we can find out more info from anyone else who worked on the game then we’re at a dead end in trying to find out how much of the game was made and why it got cancelled.

Puggsy 2

Puggsy was an innovative little platformer released by Psygnosis on the Megadrive in 1993 and the Amiga a year later. A sequel was promised at the time according to Wikipedia but nothing ever came of it, probably due to poor sales of the original, even though it’s highly thought of.

A search online gives no details at all of a possible sequel, and of course Wikipedia isn’t the most reliable of sources but given the positive reputation of the game it would make sense that they wanted to give the franchise another go.

We’ve contacted the company Jon Burton set up, Traveller’s Tales, who produced Puggsy for Psygnosis, to see if we can chat to him and ask a few questions. Beyond that however the trail is completely cold. Any ideas?

Sonic 3 (V1)

Of course Sonic 3 wasn’t an unreleased Megadrive game, and it went on to become one of the top ten best selling games released on the system. However, budgetary and scheduling issues meant several planned levels had to be cut from the game. Presumably these were at least in a state of near-completion when they were canned and given the stature of the series you would hope that something remains of these unreleased levels. Yuji Naka was part of the Sonic Team that produced all the Megadrive Sonic games and we’ve tried to get in touch but had no luck so far.

Due to the high profile of Sonic it’s possible, perhaps even probable, that Sega and anyone who still owns the copyright to Sonic 3 that there would be reticence to release unreleased material into the public domain, but it would be nice to see it archived publicly for posterity given the importance of the blue hedgehog to gaming history.

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