Documenting unreleased, cancelled and prototype video games.
Covering unreleased and cancelled games and prototypes on both consoles and computers. We are a large archive dedicated to preserving games that were never released to the public. Sharing history and stories from the developers, assets and more before it is too late.
A non-profit digitisation project, aiming to digitally preserve software and history which would otherwise be lost for good. If for any reason there is anything that you do not wish to be on the website, please contact us for removal.
Getting into a bit of a pattern at the moment of doing posts on differences between early previews and final releases of games on a Friday. I’ll see if I can keep it up! Today we take a look at a preview of Ghouls ‘N’ Ghosts that was previewed in French magazine TILT, showcasing screenshots of the Atari ST edition in particular.
Also known as: Sub-Scan
Released on the Atari 2600, SEGA Electronic’s Sub-Scan was also due for release on the Commodore Vic-20 (and other platforms to be confirmed).
It was being developed by the same author (Joe Sengir) who worked on another unreleased Vic 20 SEGA game called Tac-Scan. Compared to that game though, Deep Scan was fully complete.
It isn’t known why the game was never actually released to the world, but its believed to be due to SEGA leaving the Vic 20 market and moving over to the C64. It was confirmed by the developer that they no longer had anything of the game, so it could well be lost forever.
Do you know anything more about this conversion?
Our next entry is for an arcade action adventure game set in the East, where you must guide Chinto through a castle full of traps and evil guards to avenge his parents’ death.
Spread across around 400 screens with a slanted top-down viewpoint, the game was to be a console-style martial arts game with Chinto avoiding traps, navigating mazes and engaging in combat galore with ninjas, guards and a large red dragon at one stage. The graphical style was very interesting overall, with characters that had small bodies and large heads.
Ixion is an intriguing arcade title that was due for release from SEGA back in 1983, and was based on Zaxxon’s hardware, even though you may not think it looking at the game. The game was a top-down 2D grid based action title, where you must collect all the letters to spell out the word IXION, whilst shooting enemies and avoiding being shot yourself.
According to Segaretro.org , it is suggested that Ixion likely failed its location test, considering that it was largely finished. Thankfully the game has been dumped and is actually fully playable in MAME.
Grzegorz Antosiewicz has kindly provided a number of titles and scans showcasing assets that never quite made the final build, so here is another post looking at one of those titles. Blastar was a neat multi-directional shooter which got mixed reviews from the press at the time.
Blork was a very stylish underwater shooter being created by the demo group Scienide (http://www.scienide.de/) around the mid-late 90s, where you control a cute fish main character and his octopus friend within a very dark and gloomy underwater world. Development was by Ply2, with music by Exodus and graphics by Blork and Nytech.
We are blessed to have a number of various preservation projects dedicated to unreleased/prototype games, especially with the vast number of platforms out there to try and preserve for. The Hidden Palace have for many years been preserving various prototypes and unreleased games across 16-bit (and onwards) platforms and this weekend they have announced one of their biggest endeavours yet.
Over 700 PlayStation 2 prototypes have been archived for you to check out, and there is much more to come too. Keep checking out for news and updates over at https://hiddenpalace.org/News/Project_Deluge:_PlayStation_2
DISCLAIMER: We are a non-profit digitisation project, aiming to digitally preserve software and history which would otherwise be lost for good. If for any reason there is anything that you do not wish to be on the website, please contact us for removal.