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You forgot that there is also Starcraft Ghost with all 6 missions playable in hopes that someone someday reverse engineers the dump file that contains the instructions into a new source code for the game. Though this first leak isnt the most complete one made by the other company blizzard hired later whom the game is 90% complete
hellofresh is never gonna convince me to buy its disgusting food, someone's probably gonna pee on them because he got bullied at work also I swear hellofresh sponsors more people than raid shadow legends would have dreamed of, kinda red flag ain't it?
Golden Axed was not released by dev. It was released by SEGA and the devs complained, legally it was SEGA's but the devs said it was a terrible experience working for them and didn't want them releasing it
to clarify, Dinosaur Planet is far from complete on N64. There's a lot of progression blocks and in general a lot is missing to make it fully playable. There is a mod that fixes some stuff and makes more of it playable, and a decompilation being worked on, but yeah. It's still awesome we have it though
Well almost all data is squeezed somewhere in there. Game even has end credits. But the build leaked is somewhat buggy, as it was already altered into Starfox Adventures on that build, so many set pieces that were ready, do not necessary work on leaked version.
The last time I checked the restoration project was progressing well, they had even put Saber back in the game in Fox's place with the animations working and some previously inaccessible areas were playable, even the final boss and the credits were gifts the last time I checked.
@@MoonSarito It's beatable now, and a lot of big things have been fixed. It's still a work in progress but I haven't felt so optimistic about it in a while! It's very night and day from how broken the vanilla ROM is
Interesting thing about the half life dlc blue shift. Blue shift was originally made exclusively for the dreamcast version of half life. After its cancellation they salvaged blue shift and released it as a standalone dlc for the pc
Another interesting tidbit: The Half-Life Dreamcast port sunk a company. The company, called Captivation Digital Laboratories, had literally just been created and immediately was assigned development of the Half-Life Dreamcast port by Gearbox, who was assigned by Valve to do the port. Gearbox Software developed Half-Life: Blue Shift while Captivation developed the base game conversion, menus and such. It was costing them a fortune to develop, and they were banking on the release of the title just to make back some money, however Valve abruptly dropped the project, and paid little to zero compensation to Captivation for their hard efforts. They soon after filed for bankruptcy and were demolished. It's really unfortunate, as they were only founded in 1996, and lasted a mere 5 years before meeting the grave at the hands of one, cancelled re-release. It was co-founded by Robert Morgan, an ex-Sega of America employee who previously worked on Comix Zone, Eternal Champions, and most notably Sonic X-Treme (the cancelled Saturn game.) It isn't known who the other co-founder is, however it is known that they closely worked with Sega, and Robert had also co-founded another company called Point of View, also born 1996, and lasted to 2010, where it created Criticom (an awful fighting game), the Saturn port of Mortal Kombat Trilogy (decent), and also aided in the development of Sonic X-Treme. In the end neither company were very successful or notable, really with this one exception.
Small correction, Rayman Raving Rabbids was developed in house by Ubisoft. Pheonix Studios were developing a different version of Rayman 4 before it, but it got cancelled which is how Raving Rabbids ended up existing in the first place, it was meant to be the replacement.
I briefly worked at Climax Studios testing a 360 game called Avalon. It was a 30+ player 3rd person shooter and was pretty fun. It never released, but there is a trailer online.
Some of my favorites include Pokémon Picross for the Game Boy, which was advertised and actually fully completed, but it wasn't leaked until the Nintendo gigaleak. It's 100% complete and can be found online, and an English translation patch has been made. Another favorite of mine is the Pokémon Gold and Silver build shown off in 1997, which was from before development mostly restarted. It contains an entire scrapped region and Pokédex, and likely was almost complete. Many recreations of it exist, so you can see what it'd be like if it wasn't cancelled!
I know the ramifications of Golden Axed kinda make it a bad example, but I really wish there were more “official” releases of this sort. Stuff like Star Fox 2 and Earthbound Beginnings are always welcome IMO
Star Fox 2 has been officially released by Nintendo nowadays, first on the Mini SNES in 2017 and a few years afterwards also in their Nintendo Online Plus subscription service.
One that's real interesting to me because part of it WAS officially released to the public is the cancelled PS1 tie-in game for the movie Titan A.E. It was cancelled so late into production that a demo of it made it onto PlayStation magazine demo discs, and it was later discovered that with some hacking, you can play through most of the game using just the demo build.
One game that was cancelled previously that I'm looking forward has to be Shantae Advance, and this game never ceased to fascinate me, from the clever mechanics like the tremor engine, which would spin the back layer of the loop based levels to give access to new areas and solve puzzles to the art style, which was more reminiscent of Shantae GBC than Risky's Revenge, just with a GBA coat of paint! And it just shocked me when it was revealed at LRG3 (Limited Run's E3-like event) 2023, with the game looking pretty much identical to how it did back in 2003 or 2004! Maybe you should do a video about cancelled games that eventually released as full fledged games in an official capacity, Ultracore and Clockwork Aquario are another example of this
Some you missed: 1. Tomb Raider: 10th Anniversary Edition (Core Design). This is the Duke Nukem Forever 2001 of Tomb Raider: it was by the original developers & simply updated every room in the original Tomb Raider to a mixture of Angel of Darkness & Legend standards using a Lara model based on her beta Legend one and moves from that game returned as well as brand new ones with levels also changed to match without cutting anything out (the closest they came to that being merging several close enough together areas like in Palace Midas in a way that made sense architecturally). Lara’s Home from the Core era was greatly expanded, the secrets system overhauled with a new trading feature & the goal of unlocking bonus challenge levels, a co-op mode with puzzle modifications to match like in Blinx 2 and a brand new final level after the original final one with the most badass boss fight in any Tomb Raider game since Dr Willard & the cut plans for Eckhardt’s fight. All this on PSP of all things as a timed exclusive with more HD PC & PS2 ports soon after. Had it actually released this would have been the Black Mesa of Tomb Raider. So far it survives as an early alpha build that was being turns into a similarly cancelled Indiana Jones game. The restoration project aiming to make TRAE a complete game are also taking their sweet ass time getting anywhere in 3 years. If Core’s old team or people at Eidos have later, more complete builds they’re not saying. 2. Duke Nukem Forever 2001. The most famous build of an infamous game that’s basically TRAE for Duke. The build from that time was nowhere near 90% complete as some claimed and if there is a 90% complete build of this version at all, it was clearly 2002 at the earliest. The 2001 build seemed to be made just for the E3 trailer but a lot of framework was there hinting at their plans: a less meandering intro level, Duke actually was to help people in the Lady Killer Hotel attack, Las Vegas was at night and lit up like a Christmas tree, we could explore various places along the strip, we’d get a fun as hell Shadow the Hedgehog chopper bike in first person and among other things, the aliens didn’t come until later. For now we had soldiers & civilians infected with Flood like parasites, predating Halo by months. Dr Proton was the main antagonist, we’d meet Bombshell at the strip bar who would initially be hostile as she thought we’d gone crazy and Duke’s dream was instead him having a nightmare about level 1 in Duke 3D: it stated off like the original level but at the end turns into a Twin Peaks red room with zebra carpet parody. Unlike TRAE above, this game’s Restoration Project team have decent management & there’s more interest as TRAE is so obscure compare to Duke. 3. Half Life 2 Beta story. Imagine Wolfenstein: The New Order with aliens, cyborgs brainwashed by aliens ala Strife on the Doom engine & the moon replaced with the Arctic combined with the world of Sonic Forces. They live on as mods, especially Dark Interval & Raising the Bar Redux. 4. Sonic 2 Beta Story. This was Sega of America’s answer to the Japan developed Sonic CD though their shared time travel plot was a coincidence. Sonic was on South Island like the first game & had to chase Eggman back in time, who would meddle in the past to ruin the present, the future being even worse. Unlike Sonic CD, there was no good future for getting all emeralds. The present levels were based on Sonic 1 for the Master System & cut levels later appeared in later games: Dust Hill (a ruined Green Hill that often gets confused with non ruined present Sand Shower) later became Mirage Saloon in Mania and its theme of Green Hill being drained into an inhospitable desert was brought back in Sonic Forces. Ocean Wind based on Bridge zone from Sonic 1 MS (present day Oil Ocean, the latter being the bad future or ruined present) inspired the design of Emerald Coast in Sonic Adventure, Metropolis base (over Hidden Palace) which was a large pyramid near Sand Shower inspired Hidden Base in Sonic Adventure 2 & Arsenal Pyramid in Forces. The infamous Genocide City first had its tile set reused for level 3 in Sonic Spinball before finally appearing in Forces albeit with a new aesthetic and renamed after Metropolis zone. 5. Mother 3 64. Mother 3 was originally going to be a 3D game on the Nintendo 64 with many of the same stuff from the final game on Gameboy Advance, but with some differences such as Claus being a party member at least for longer (a very DNF 2001 mines sequence has him riding a cart with Lucas) and, actually showing the apocalypse Leder tells us about via shots of destroyed Mother 2 areas (& destroyed Mother 1 ones too?) and a bleaker ending. Elements of those were going to be in the GBA version too such as a nightmare final boss as Lucas has a mental breakdown, Porky dying upon defeat, the full fiery apocalypse at the end showing more destruction as animals flee in terror while others lie burned by magma and Lucas choosing to just nuke everything with no rebirth out of despair. Many of those got either outright cut or dumbed down as even Itoi himself was frightened by what he wrote. Tanetane Island was another example too.
@@NoahNCopeland I know that about the mock-up screenshot. I even saw how it was done in a different video. There are early builds of Sonic 2 you can play but calling them playable is a bit generous.i forgot to specify that mods & fan games are the way Sonic 2 beta lives on, similar to the Half Life 2 beta as like the latter, the actual beta builds & their levels really aren’t that playable, Hidden Palace being the most famous one as it’s one of the few that doesn’t dump you into a bottomless pit as soon as the level starts. The main difference between those and TRAE & Duke Nukem Forever 2001 is that the former two needed completely handmade levels simply based on the beta plans as opposed to actually modifying the betas to an acceptable state.
Mother 3 is one of my favourite games ever made. But after hearing about what they had planned on the n64 version and it's different gameplay mechanics I feel like we missed out on an early 3d Classic, would love a leaked build of it
As a child, the numerous Sonic 2 prototypes were my roman empire. Seeing all the early sprites and remnants of cut zones was mind blowing to me, and the changed in between each prototype made my imagination run wild about any other unknown prototypes that might be out there containing more information about the unused level concepts and the scrapped time travel mechanic. I'm still secretly hoping that there's a yet unreleased prototype that has the intended use of music track 10 in the final game's sound test.
There actually is, don't remember the exact build but that track was supposed to be used in Hidden Palace Zone. It was later re-added in the mobile remake but with different music, so sad that the original intended one was not used at all.
@@theYTfox I remember that the mobile remake used the mystic cave zone two-player music. Maybe the Simon Wai prototype had used track 10? But yeah, it sucks that it still didn’t end up being used in the end.
Castlevania Resurrection prototype for the Dreamcast, Project Dream which was the predecessor to what later became Banjo Kazooie, 40 Winks port for the N64, Toejam and Earl 3 for Dreamcast, Ninja Gaiden for the Mega Drive, all of which have been dumped and shared online, the gigaleak also had a prototype of Super Donkey, to name a few.
Yeah I saw the prototype for this when it first leaked online. That game could've been so damn cool, it's a shame Konami scrapped it. Then again this was that transitioning phase for Konami when they started turning into the Pachinko Machine, gambler-loving greedy corporation they are now. Hopefully one day some brave developers will step in and try to finish the game for them!
@@koolaid33 I think, you are confusing dates. Resurrection was canceled in 2001. If anything at this point (and for the whole decade) Konami had a pretty good run with a lot of Castlevania, Contra and Metal Gear games being released almost on a early basis. Konami had gone to shits post-2010, when most of their classic series were killed, outside of MGS.
I would love to see more prototypes of Duke Nukem Forever to leak. The October 2001 build was impressive but still very rudimentary, but I’d love to see the 2002/2003 era builds as well.
Diddy Kong Pilot is more likely as that was far in development before it was shifted into Banjo Pilot. Donkey Kong Racing never actually got far in development at all.
At least a playable prototype was leaked in 2020. There is gameplay footage online and the dev files can be found on torrent sites. From what I've seen it's not nearly as polished as the other legendary leaked Blizzard game, Warcraft Adventures (a point&click graphic adventure game featuring Thrall from before War3) but it's something.
The retail version of star fox 2 for snes was cancelled in favor of star fox 64, but it was included in snes classic and on snes software: nintendo switch online on the Nintendo switch.
@@Schwarzorn it was more for clarity, the physical version of star fox 2 for SNES still did not gotten release in any region, nor did super Mario 64: Rumble pak edition(updated version) on North America and pal region. The latter would be a blockbuster rental only like clay fighter: sculptor’s cut should it does gotten release in North America during the 90s.
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on the Game Com is one of the strangest and most fascinating cancelled games that were found recently. It was pretty damn ambitious, too.
The one game I wish you had mentioned was Diddy Kong Pilot. I know some aspects like track layouts and music are very similar to what we ultimately got in Banjo-Pilot, but there are still several aspects that were unique to that original DK identity. It had three different campaigns (Diddy Kong Pilot with Team Kongs, Kremling Pilot with Team Krem, and Cranky Kong Pilot with Team Cranky), aspects like voice lines and (of course) the playable characters, and some other stuff like dogfights for bosses. It's just stuff that's only really in this version. And most of all is that there's a build of it that is basically fully complete, save a few audio glitches, that anyone can play today. What we have with this is basically a whole other DK racing game on the GBA, and I think it deserves some love. I like to think of it as a counterpart to Banjo-Pilot rather than just an earlier version. (It's also the only DK racing game out there where you can play as Klaptrap, and I think that's pretty neat. It's worth it just for Klaptrap.)
Also, one of the four Kremlings that you can play as is called Kritter, but it's just straight-up Krunch from Diddy Kong Racing with a southern accent. So that's something.
@@LeonSKennedy7777 Would be awesome but chanses to that are extremely thin. To much costs and Rare/Microsoft would need to find a parter who is willing to do that publishing & manufacturing.
One of the most interesting cut games in my opinion was another for the Dreamcast, half for what it intended to be, and the other half for the extremely unfortunate reason as to it's cancellation. The game is titled Propeller Arena, it doesn't belong to any franchise (that I know of) but it was made and set to be published by Sega, with the release date of September 19th, 2001. Judging by the title and release date it's easy to piece together why it was cancelled, but to go more in-depth Propeller Arena was Sega's take on Ace Combat. It would feature sprawling maps to have dogfights in with classic WW2 airplanes, taking place in the future where a contest is held requiring these old planes to win a big prize. There was intended online features, different modes, characters, unlockables, etc. and the game was dumped in full online a few years back. It is 100% complete, which raises the question as to why it was canned. Well as it would happen, the game had a stage early on that happened to be a metropolis stage, where you held dogfights in a city somewhat similar to New York City, and you could fly your plane into buildings (which would destroy the plane, not the building), and the game was slated for release 8 days after 9/11 would occur. Sega, in full panic mode suddenly with a game that would look really bad on their end to release right after a global tragedy like 9/11, decided to scrap the project, possibly seeking a later date to release it but giving up as it would only be by February of 2002 that they would officially end the Dreamcast in the west. In the end the game never got to see the light of day officially, even though it's a really solid game that would be seen today as a classic on the platform if it got it's chance. Hopefully one day Sega will re-release it like they have with other cancelled projects, but since it doesn't belong to any franchise it's definitely less likely. Couple others I'd mention: Resident Evil on the Game Boy Color. Very ambitious title that got really close to release but was cut short. It wasn't finished, but you can find leaked copies online. Castlevania Resurrection and Ecco the Dolphin: Sentinels of the Universe, two more Dreamcast games that never got a chance but did get somewhat far in.
Dinosaur Planet has gotten a lot of community patches and fixes since it first leaked out as of Febuary 2021, if you look around you'll find it and while the game's still missing a couple levels, cutscenes and there are some unfinished sections where you're likely to crash the game (especially towards the end), it's pretty much semi-playable start to finish! You'll also find as well that Dinosaur Planet has way more content planned for it than what it ultimately shipped for SFA.
As cool as it is to see the last 2 builds of Sonic Xtreme, it's obvious why it was cancelled. 3D games were improving so fast they they never would have caught up at the rate they were going, especially with the Dreamcast on the horizon. It was already 96, and Sonic Adventure only came out 2 years later in 98. The 1st engine worked but didn't feel very fast and the camera perspective obscures a lot of the level (which explains the fish-eye used in other builds). The 2nd is a lot faster and smoother but it looks like they would have had to rebuild the game completely to work with the new mechanics. It wouldn't surprise me if it was another engine built in parallel after they noticed the limitations of the original one.
While you remembered Half life for the Dreamcast you forgot about Propeller Arena also for the Dreamcast. I've always heard both mentioned when people bring up lost Dreamcast games and it was leaked as well.
This is so cool, I love seeing unreleased games! It's such a fascinating look at things. Rayman 4 especially, it very much looks like the missing story link that was meant to lead into Raving Rabbids (R4 they're invading, RR they're forcing you to be a gladiator in weird mini-games).
I played the N64 Dinosaur Planet beta that leaked a while ago and I actually had a better time than with Star Fox Adventure on the Game Cube. I always felt that the "Star Fox elements" in Star Fox Adventures were poorly put together and put in at the last minute, plus I really hated how they cut Krystal's entire campaign (in Dinosaur Planet she is one of the main characters while in Star Fox Adventure she is imprisoned in a crystal for almost the entire game) and this ended up making the game unpleasant for both Star Fox fans and adventure game fans in general. I really feel that if they had followed through with the original idea of Dinosaur Planet on the Nintendo 64, the game today would be seen as the RARE classic that closed the Nintendo 64 era with a flourish, the game is extremely fun, the story is interesting , the gameplay is good and have that "Ocarina of Time feeling", the visuals are impressive for what the Nintendo 64 can do, I've never seen a game as beautiful on the console as this. It's a shame that in the end it ended up becoming a Star Fox game for the Game Cube that not even Star Fox fans like.
This. I loved Starfox Adventures, and it had nothing to do with the Starfox elements (despite also being a Starfox fan). Dinosaur Planet would have been iconic had it been released in its true form.
In a good reality, the n64 would have had Majoras Mask, Kirby 64, Mother 3, Dinosaur Planet among others as it's finishing games. An all out bang I'd warrant
@@oi6915I still dream of the day a Mother 3/Earthbound 64 beta leaks. As the game appeared to the public 3 times and was playable 2 of them, I'm sure there is a cartridge with a beta out there.
Let's not fool ourselves and think it would be all sunshines and rainbows like we do. If we take a look around, we see things like General Scales still ends up finished off without a boss fight (so much so, that Scales gets his spine snapped in a cutscene). Ultimately getting clowned on. Which would have been the final product for Dinosaur Planet, where as initial development plans showed they would of had a boss fight in mind. Which ends up being different for planning for Star Fox Adventures plot for General Scales, where they also had a boss fight planned for that, but was scrapped due to time crunch from Microsoft's buyout. While Dinosaur Planet's development had no such reason to remove a fight with General Scales to begin with, where as Adventures at least had an excuse. And that's all this ultimately ends up boiling down to, is that Star Fox Adventures had more potential gameplay in mind. With more plans and designs from Dinosaur Planet that probably would have transferred over to Star Fox Adventure, considering how much of it is already Dinosaur Planet gameplay wise. A lot of the game is the way it is, is due to rushed development because of the situation of the buyout. So there's no telling how good it would have actually been as a fully finished product, just like with Dinosaur Planet. Finally, according to what is found out in interviews the past year, or so, that Star Fox would have ended up as an "Adventure" style game anyways, with or without Dinosaur Planet. So honestly, who would you rather handle that kind of game, Nintendo themselves, or Rare Ware?
@@byronlyons3548Nah, I really think things would have been a lot different if they had gone with the original Dinosaur Planet idea on the N64 instead of turning it into Star Fox game for the Game Cube. I follow the Dinosaur Planet restoration project very closely and I can say with certainty that so far I have had a way better experience with Dinossaur Planet than with Star Fox Adventures. (and this actually made me see how the changes they made to Star Fox Adventure really weren't really that good and some of them really feels kinda rushed) Furthermore, there is the fact that practically all RARE games for the Nintendo 64 became classics, this game was basically the most ambitious game on the Nintendo 64 hardware (perhaps only behind Mother 3 which was also never released) and one of the few games that makes good use of the Expansion Pak, I really doubt that if Dinosaur Planet had continued on the Nintendo 64 it wouldn't be remembered as an ambitious classic that closed the Nintendo 64 cycle with a flourish. But like I said before, instead it ended up becoming a forgettable game for the Game Cube that even Star Fox fans don't like.
I feel _SO BAD_ for Climax. Like, I'm a fan of theirs because I've seen the quality they can put out - I grew up playing Sudeki, loved Silent Hill Shattered Memories, and recently have even seen them do a REALLY GOOD _licensed game_ for Dreamworks Dragons (seriously, if you're a fan of old-school top-down Zelda/Mana/Alundra-style games, check out Dragons: Dawn of the New Rider. Can't recommend it enough)... but they're still mostly unknown. None of their games are _huge_ hits, and high profile games with the potential to break out like Elder Scrolls Travels or Legacy of Kain Dead Sun get *cancelled.* Seriously, how can you not feel for 'em? They've got so much talent and still struggle for recognition... Also, thank you for making me aware of that squeaky, farty chicken in Glover 2. lmao. 😄 Great video!
I can't be the only one that saw Rayman and thought Rayman 2's original 2D build? WAIT! -Realisation- Does Ubisoft hate even numbers? Rayman 2's original version got scrapped and cancelled, and then a new Rayman 2 was made. And Rayman 4 got scraped in just the concept stage, cancelled, and then ANOTHER Rayman 4 (The one that got leaked) was in development and THAT also got scrapped and another game made instead.... Wow... Also yes.. Rayman 4 was cancelled..... Not once... But TWICE!
So, I'm guessing the final Sonic Xtreme build was the one done using the Nights engine, or at least, was the one most obviously made using it, the one that made Yuji Naka (I think) rage and threaten to quit (I think) If nothing else, that would explain the sudden change in appearance over just four days... Unless, we were to find out that the rendering engine in the earlier demos were also poached from Nights, in which case, well, I can't explain otherwise how there could be that much of a difference in just four days between demos.
Everytime I see a GVG video about a super specific yet interesting subject, it's always you Jon! First the Mii's on DS and PSP GPS videos and now this one!! I don't know how you do it, keep doing it!
Sonic also had a canceled educational game called Sonic's Edusoft for the Master System that is also fully playable. While the game is not that interesting It uses sprites from the Mega Drive/Genesis version of Sonic 1, and that's neat. There is also the arcade game SEGASonic Bros. A puzzle game that is basically a mix of tetris with the special stages of sonic 3, in fact, the Special Stage music from Sonic 3 is in fact originally from SEGASonic Bros. Both games were dated from 1991 and SEGASonic has unused sprites of Vector, a character that would only be seen in game in 1995.
Beta Restoration is its own category of Rom hack. I'd like to play Resident Evil 1.5 some day. And similarly I've seen Zelda 64 projects trying to build full games out of ancient screenshots and footage from before Ocarina's release.
There's so many canceled games that got releases. Even official releases, such as Counter-Strike: Condition-Zero's Ritual Entertainment version - released as a bonus "Deleted Scenes" with the offiical release. Duke Nukem Forever's 2001 version got released. Several prototype games for consoles, Final Fantasy II English on NES, Diddy Kong Pilot on GBA, etc. etc.
Not mentioned is: Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors for Sega CD. A fully finished version of this game leaked and is playable. Sadly, I personallt don't have a way to play Sega CD games, but this game looks fantastic.
Another example of a cancelled game being playable: The location test build of Dan-Ku-Ga, the sequel to Kaiser Knuckle, is fully playable right now with online on Fightcade. If you're into fighting games in any capacity, definitely check it out, there's even an active community who has latched onto it and even brought it to Frosty Faustings as a side event in 2024 (Also I think Taito themselves technically released this build on a mini console a few years back)
Battlefront 3 being brought up and how it's story was reused for Elite Squadron on the DS and PSP is funny considering the recent episode of the Bad Batch toyed with the idea of a force-sensitive clone, just like the lead of Elite Squadron.
Rayman Raving Rabbids is such an odd thing. The main project got turned into a minigame collection but the GBA was a platformer that used a lot of elements from an even earlier version of Rayman 4, the one in the DS was pretty much a straight adaptation of the game that was shown and we never got, and then the J2ME version by Gameloft was just A Rayman platformer that seemed to only have gotten concept art of the enemies and not much else because the game has little to do with anything else in the franchise and the gameplay is more inspired by Sonic than previous Rayman games. It's like Ubisoft never bothered to tell the external studios that the main game had a drastic change in direction, or even check on what they were doing.
The reason that last sonic xtreme build was on another engine so soon is because it was planned that the boss battles would use a different engine than the main game
Similar to Biohazard 2, Pokemon Gold and Silver has an unreleased beta that made it online a few years ago. It has ~40 different Pokemon, some of which were eventually revisited in future generations, and a completely different map based on the entirety of Japan rather than a singular region. Some ROM hackers have made it a playable game and it’s a pretty fun alternate Gen 2 experience. Now someone needs to find Earthbound 64.
I assume they had multiple level types or engine tests for Sonic Extreme. It's hard to say if "only 4 days apart" actually matters for those builds. In the super early alpha stages, they probably had developers doing a kind of "game jam" (as we call them) to just make a simple ring demo. Whatever felt the most playable might have been the selected direction. But I assume Sega thought they were all kinda bad lmao. Look at similar titles at the time: Tomb Raider had slow movement and confined spaces. Croc and Jumping Flash had tiny little level areas. Mario 64's massive levels were a huge deal. Sonic requires insane amounts of level space due to the speed aspect. That's the genius behind Crash Bandicoot and its level streaming tech. I think a Crash Bandicoot - style would have been the direction had Sega known it existed. They use a similar tech in Boost Trilogy games with the Hedgehog engine by procedurally generating seconds of background elements, quite similar to how Factor 5 acheived the Death Star trench run. I think the Saturn existed just a few years too early for Sega to make it shine, in terms of techniques and knowledge.
The Oblivion game on PSP is so fascinating to me because looking at the game makes you realize that it looks better than the original game in some ways. Ie lighting and blood effects, some of the animations look a little better to me, like they're more fluid and weighty.
That RE 1.5 bit... It really irks me that there's people out there who, in a misguided bid to feel superior to others, decide to hoard a piece of gaming history instead of sharing it with the world. Like, this isn't exactly the Mona Lisa. You can just dump the game files and still claim to have the original master. Kinda reminds me of how someone in Japan won a auction for an unreleased, undumped game and decided it was gonna stay in his private collection forever.
My cancelled game I lamented was the 'B.C.' for the original Xbox. No one seems to have much info on it. The only thing I still have is an Xbox magazine demo disk with footage that proves it actually existed.
I’d die happy if someone could get a hold of the playable versions of Tomba 3 and Megaman Legends 3 and release them Sadly one is lost to time, and the other is locked up in Capcom’s game vault and may never get released
i've accepted at this point that i will be huffing copium forever, but i am still holding out hope for ushiro (level-5). i bought all the light novels, read the manga when it was serialised, and i'm still waiting for the switch revival. but at this point i think it's only me and a legally-distinct volleyball with a face still waiting.
Gotta shout out Sutte Hakkun GB. Great Puzzle game for the GBC (there's a DMG build too) that plays well and looks beautiful, but never came out. One of my highlights of the Gigaleak, to be honest.
If Star Fox 2 got released on the snes it would have changed the whole landscape of gaming. Jon should do a video on how it inspired elements of Mario64 and ocarina of time
I so wish we could've gotten Rayman 4... I remember being a young Rayman fan and being so sorely disappointed by Raving Rabbids; and the leaked build of Rayman 4 seems like everything I would've wanted from the next mainline Rayman _and more._ I just hope that we can eventually get an official Rayman 4, even if it's less Rabbid-filled than the one we could have had.
Ever since I was a kid I’ve desperately wanted to play DEMONIK from the movie Grandmas Boy. My mother knew I loved video games so she showed me the movie when I was extremely young 😭 I had know idea what 90% of the jokes and scenes even meant 😅 90s parents bro I can’t
Actually the version of rayman 4 (raving rabbids) is not the rayman 4 that Phoenix studio was working on, we don't actually have any builds of that to my knowledge, just concept art
It's a good one to mention but since it's not a cancelled game it doesn't count I guess, unlike say the cancelled Dreamcast port of hl1 despite it being mostly the same game as goldsrc with Blue Shift included before they seperated it for pc release
@@oi6915 True. though I think you could make a argument that it could still fit. given how radically different the beta was to hl2's retail. so much of it was changed it's virtually a different game aside from characters and certain plot points.
Dinosaur Planet has always fascinated me. I wonder what it could have been like without needing to arbitrarily insert Starfox into it. Would have allowed more creative freedom I’m sure.
I'd love to see another crack at a 3D Rayman game, but knowing modern Ubisoft it would be another open world game with a glut of repetitive side activities and filler.
Need those Soul Reaver alphas thelostworlds and rainaaudron showed off o their channels. Mother 64, Prey 2, any of those bioshock infinite "demos", Soul Reaver 2 air forge demo for dreamcast, just to name a few. Played half life for dreamcast on real hardware with the mouse and keyboard, those framerates and loading screens alongside using a whole vmu for saves made it less convenient, but a decent experience. The actual controller support for dreamcast is horrendous.
I guess the game came out in Japan just fine, technically only the localization was cancelled, not the game itself. But I guess stuff like Dinosaur Planet wasn't really cancelled either. Star Fox 2 would've been a good Nintendo pick, though.
Thanks to HelloFresh for sponsoring today's video. Go to strms.net/hellofresh_gvg , use my code GVG16FM, and receive 16 free meals + free dessert for life while subscription is active
Wasnt hellofresh under some weird allegations?
Hey, HelloFresh is known to mistreat its employees (low wages, union busting, unsafe working conditions, you name it)
fuck no.
You forgot that there is also Starcraft Ghost with all 6 missions playable
in hopes that someone someday reverse engineers the dump file that contains the instructions into a new source code for the game.
Though this first leak isnt the most complete one made by the other company blizzard hired later whom the game is 90% complete
hellofresh is never gonna convince me to buy its disgusting food, someone's probably gonna pee on them because he got bullied at work
also I swear hellofresh sponsors more people than raid shadow legends would have dreamed of, kinda red flag ain't it?
1:48 Elder Scrolls Travels: Oblivion (Sony PSP)
3:57 Dinosaur Planet (Nintendo 64)
5:08 Sonic X-Treme (Sega Saturn)
7:22 Star Wars: Battlefront III (Xbox 360)
8:50 Resident Evil 2 (Sony PS1)
10:29 Half-Life (Sega Dreamcast)
11:50 Kameo (Microsoft Xbox)
12:39 Golden Axed (Steam) (Released by dev)
13:27 Saints Row: Undercover (Sony PSP) (Released by dev)
14:28 Glover 2 (Nintendo 64)
15:25 Rayman 4 (PC)
17:27 GoldenEye Remastered (Xbox 360)
Golden Axed was not released by dev. It was released by SEGA and the devs complained, legally it was SEGA's but the devs said it was a terrible experience working for them and didn't want them releasing it
Glover 2 was canceled? I could've sworn I'd played it as a kid.
Thx
Thank you.
to clarify, Dinosaur Planet is far from complete on N64. There's a lot of progression blocks and in general a lot is missing to make it fully playable. There is a mod that fixes some stuff and makes more of it playable, and a decompilation being worked on, but yeah. It's still awesome we have it though
Restoration project is far along too!
Well almost all data is squeezed somewhere in there. Game even has end credits. But the build leaked is somewhat buggy, as it was already altered into Starfox Adventures on that build, so many set pieces that were ready, do not necessary work on leaked version.
The last time I checked the restoration project was progressing well, they had even put Saber back in the game in Fox's place with the animations working and some previously inaccessible areas were playable, even the final boss and the credits were gifts the last time I checked.
@@MoonSarito It's beatable now, and a lot of big things have been fixed. It's still a work in progress but I haven't felt so optimistic about it in a while! It's very night and day from how broken the vanilla ROM is
@@joyconboyz1409do you know if in this version you actually get to fight General Scales?
Interesting thing about the half life dlc blue shift. Blue shift was originally made exclusively for the dreamcast version of half life. After its cancellation they salvaged blue shift and released it as a standalone dlc for the pc
Another interesting tidbit: The Half-Life Dreamcast port sunk a company. The company, called Captivation Digital Laboratories, had literally just been created and immediately was assigned development of the Half-Life Dreamcast port by Gearbox, who was assigned by Valve to do the port. Gearbox Software developed Half-Life: Blue Shift while Captivation developed the base game conversion, menus and such. It was costing them a fortune to develop, and they were banking on the release of the title just to make back some money, however Valve abruptly dropped the project, and paid little to zero compensation to Captivation for their hard efforts. They soon after filed for bankruptcy and were demolished. It's really unfortunate, as they were only founded in 1996, and lasted a mere 5 years before meeting the grave at the hands of one, cancelled re-release. It was co-founded by Robert Morgan, an ex-Sega of America employee who previously worked on Comix Zone, Eternal Champions, and most notably Sonic X-Treme (the cancelled Saturn game.) It isn't known who the other co-founder is, however it is known that they closely worked with Sega, and Robert had also co-founded another company called Point of View, also born 1996, and lasted to 2010, where it created Criticom (an awful fighting game), the Saturn port of Mortal Kombat Trilogy (decent), and also aided in the development of Sonic X-Treme. In the end neither company were very successful or notable, really with this one exception.
Small correction, Rayman Raving Rabbids was developed in house by Ubisoft. Pheonix Studios were developing a different version of Rayman 4 before it, but it got cancelled which is how Raving Rabbids ended up existing in the first place, it was meant to be the replacement.
Now if only this would happen with EarthBound 64
I would pay 2000 Euro for the real cartridge now
The real nerds call it Mother 3.
@@Elivoltekyou are going to need to be a bit richer than that.
Forrreals
There is a fan remake of EarthBound 64 thats been the works for a couple of years now
I briefly worked at Climax Studios testing a 360 game called Avalon. It was a 30+ player 3rd person shooter and was pretty fun. It never released, but there is a trailer online.
ua-cam.com/video/3II6KlYllhg/v-deo.html
This?
Some of my favorites include Pokémon Picross for the Game Boy, which was advertised and actually fully completed, but it wasn't leaked until the Nintendo gigaleak. It's 100% complete and can be found online, and an English translation patch has been made. Another favorite of mine is the Pokémon Gold and Silver build shown off in 1997, which was from before development mostly restarted. It contains an entire scrapped region and Pokédex, and likely was almost complete. Many recreations of it exist, so you can see what it'd be like if it wasn't cancelled!
I know the ramifications of Golden Axed kinda make it a bad example, but I really wish there were more “official” releases of this sort. Stuff like Star Fox 2 and Earthbound Beginnings are always welcome IMO
Star Fox 2 has been officially released by Nintendo nowadays, first on the Mini SNES in 2017 and a few years afterwards also in their Nintendo Online Plus subscription service.
@@Justforvisitso was mother, thats what he's saying
Mother's a complete game, though? It just wasn't translated.
One that's real interesting to me because part of it WAS officially released to the public is the cancelled PS1 tie-in game for the movie Titan A.E. It was cancelled so late into production that a demo of it made it onto PlayStation magazine demo discs, and it was later discovered that with some hacking, you can play through most of the game using just the demo build.
either is considered restoring to make fully playable with all levels but no one else is doing so. .
One game that was cancelled previously that I'm looking forward has to be Shantae Advance, and this game never ceased to fascinate me, from the clever mechanics like the tremor engine, which would spin the back layer of the loop based levels to give access to new areas and solve puzzles to the art style, which was more reminiscent of Shantae GBC than Risky's Revenge, just with a GBA coat of paint!
And it just shocked me when it was revealed at LRG3 (Limited Run's E3-like event) 2023, with the game looking pretty much identical to how it did back in 2003 or 2004!
Maybe you should do a video about cancelled games that eventually released as full fledged games in an official capacity, Ultracore and Clockwork Aquario are another example of this
Some you missed:
1. Tomb Raider: 10th Anniversary Edition (Core Design). This is the Duke Nukem Forever 2001 of Tomb Raider: it was by the original developers & simply updated every room in the original Tomb Raider to a mixture of Angel of Darkness & Legend standards using a Lara model based on her beta Legend one and moves from that game returned as well as brand new ones with levels also changed to match without cutting anything out (the closest they came to that being merging several close enough together areas like in Palace Midas in a way that made sense architecturally).
Lara’s Home from the Core era was greatly expanded, the secrets system overhauled with a new trading feature & the goal of unlocking bonus challenge levels, a co-op mode with puzzle modifications to match like in Blinx 2 and a brand new final level after the original final one with the most badass boss fight in any Tomb Raider game since Dr Willard & the cut plans for Eckhardt’s fight. All this on PSP of all things as a timed exclusive with more HD PC & PS2 ports soon after. Had it actually released this would have been the Black Mesa of Tomb Raider. So far it survives as an early alpha build that was being turns into a similarly cancelled Indiana Jones game. The restoration project aiming to make TRAE a complete game are also taking their sweet ass time getting anywhere in 3 years. If Core’s old team or people at Eidos have later, more complete builds they’re not saying.
2. Duke Nukem Forever 2001. The most famous build of an infamous game that’s basically TRAE for Duke. The build from that time was nowhere near 90% complete as some claimed and if there is a 90% complete build of this version at all, it was clearly 2002 at the earliest. The 2001 build seemed to be made just for the E3 trailer but a lot of framework was there hinting at their plans: a less meandering intro level, Duke actually was to help people in the Lady Killer Hotel attack, Las Vegas was at night and lit up like a Christmas tree, we could explore various places along the strip, we’d get a fun as hell Shadow the Hedgehog chopper bike in first person and among other things, the aliens didn’t come until later. For now we had soldiers & civilians infected with Flood like parasites, predating Halo by months.
Dr Proton was the main antagonist, we’d meet Bombshell at the strip bar who would initially be hostile as she thought we’d gone crazy and Duke’s dream was instead him having a nightmare about level 1 in Duke 3D: it stated off like the original level but at the end turns into a Twin Peaks red room with zebra carpet parody. Unlike TRAE above, this game’s Restoration Project team have decent management & there’s more interest as TRAE is so obscure compare to Duke.
3. Half Life 2 Beta story. Imagine Wolfenstein: The New Order with aliens, cyborgs brainwashed by aliens ala Strife on the Doom engine & the moon replaced with the Arctic combined with the world of Sonic Forces. They live on as mods, especially Dark Interval & Raising the Bar Redux.
4. Sonic 2 Beta Story. This was Sega of America’s answer to the Japan developed Sonic CD though their shared time travel plot was a coincidence. Sonic was on South Island like the first game & had to chase Eggman back in time, who would meddle in the past to ruin the present, the future being even worse. Unlike Sonic CD, there was no good future for getting all emeralds.
The present levels were based on Sonic 1 for the Master System & cut levels later appeared in later games: Dust Hill (a ruined Green Hill that often gets confused with non ruined present Sand Shower) later became Mirage Saloon in Mania and its theme of Green Hill being drained into an inhospitable desert was brought back in Sonic Forces. Ocean Wind based on Bridge zone from Sonic 1 MS (present day Oil Ocean, the latter being the bad future or ruined present) inspired the design of Emerald Coast in Sonic Adventure, Metropolis base (over Hidden Palace) which was a large pyramid near Sand Shower inspired Hidden Base in Sonic Adventure 2 & Arsenal Pyramid in Forces. The infamous Genocide City first had its tile set reused for level 3 in Sonic Spinball before finally appearing in Forces albeit with a new aesthetic and renamed after Metropolis zone.
5. Mother 3 64. Mother 3 was originally going to be a 3D game on the Nintendo 64 with many of the same stuff from the final game on Gameboy Advance, but with some differences such as Claus being a party member at least for longer (a very DNF 2001 mines sequence has him riding a cart with Lucas) and, actually showing the apocalypse Leder tells us about via shots of destroyed Mother 2 areas (& destroyed Mother 1 ones too?) and a bleaker ending. Elements of those were going to be in the GBA version too such as a nightmare final boss as Lucas has a mental breakdown, Porky dying upon defeat, the full fiery apocalypse at the end showing more destruction as animals flee in terror while others lie burned by magma and Lucas choosing to just nuke everything with no rebirth out of despair. Many of those got either outright cut or dumbed down as even Itoi himself was frightened by what he wrote. Tanetane Island was another example too.
cant speak for the others but there is no playable leak of that Sonic 2 you mentioned. that desert level is literally just a mockup screen shot.
@@NoahNCopeland I know that about the mock-up screenshot. I even saw how it was done in a different video. There are early builds of Sonic 2 you can play but calling them playable is a bit generous.i forgot to specify that mods & fan games are the way Sonic 2 beta lives on, similar to the Half Life 2 beta as like the latter, the actual beta builds & their levels really aren’t that playable, Hidden Palace being the most famous one as it’s one of the few that doesn’t dump you into a bottomless pit as soon as the level starts. The main difference between those and TRAE & Duke Nukem Forever 2001 is that the former two needed completely handmade levels simply based on the beta plans as opposed to actually modifying the betas to an acceptable state.
Mother 3 is one of my favourite games ever made. But after hearing about what they had planned on the n64 version and it's different gameplay mechanics I feel like we missed out on an early 3d Classic, would love a leaked build of it
I would love mother 3 on n64, literally my most desired built.
6:15 I love how the only way for Sonic to destroy the Drillheads is to impale his body directly onto its sharpest point 🗿
As a child, the numerous Sonic 2 prototypes were my roman empire. Seeing all the early sprites and remnants of cut zones was mind blowing to me, and the changed in between each prototype made my imagination run wild about any other unknown prototypes that might be out there containing more information about the unused level concepts and the scrapped time travel mechanic. I'm still secretly hoping that there's a yet unreleased prototype that has the intended use of music track 10 in the final game's sound test.
There actually is, don't remember the exact build but that track was supposed to be used in Hidden Palace Zone. It was later re-added in the mobile remake but with different music, so sad that the original intended one was not used at all.
@@theYTfox I remember that the mobile remake used the mystic cave zone two-player music. Maybe the Simon Wai prototype had used track 10? But yeah, it sucks that it still didn’t end up being used in the end.
Castlevania Resurrection prototype for the Dreamcast, Project Dream which was the predecessor to what later became Banjo Kazooie, 40 Winks port for the N64, Toejam and Earl 3 for Dreamcast, Ninja Gaiden for the Mega Drive, all of which have been dumped and shared online, the gigaleak also had a prototype of Super Donkey, to name a few.
Yeah I saw the prototype for this when it first leaked online. That game could've been so damn cool, it's a shame Konami scrapped it. Then again this was that transitioning phase for Konami when they started turning into the Pachinko Machine, gambler-loving greedy corporation they are now. Hopefully one day some brave developers will step in and try to finish the game for them!
Project Dream was dumped and leaked online?
@@koolaid33 I think, you are confusing dates. Resurrection was canceled in 2001. If anything at this point (and for the whole decade) Konami had a pretty good run with a lot of Castlevania, Contra and Metal Gear games being released almost on a early basis. Konami had gone to shits post-2010, when most of their classic series were killed, outside of MGS.
I would love to see more prototypes of Duke Nukem Forever to leak. The October 2001 build was impressive but still very rudimentary, but I’d love to see the 2002/2003 era builds as well.
I'd love a late 2002 build of DNF to leak.
The 2001 build is currently being made into a fully fleshed game with a dedicated modding team. Its called Duke Restoration Project.
Donkey Kong Racing?
A man can dream, right?
Diddy Kong Pilot is more likely as that was far in development before it was shifted into Banjo Pilot.
Donkey Kong Racing never actually got far in development at all.
@@JaidynReiman A man can dream!!!
@@JaidynReiman A man can dream
@@JaidynReimanAmanda can dream!
Starcraft Ghost
I will never get over it not getting a release.
At least a playable prototype was leaked in 2020. There is gameplay footage online and the dev files can be found on torrent sites. From what I've seen it's not nearly as polished as the other legendary leaked Blizzard game, Warcraft Adventures (a point&click graphic adventure game featuring Thrall from before War3) but it's something.
@@rustkitty
Wait, whaaaat? :O
I think I might have missed that.
I’ll check that immediately. Thanks!
I'm not even a Starcraft or RTS fan, and I'm still upset!
I've literally got this on my xbox. You need an xbox version modded with double the ram, to match the dev kit, but it's out there and available.
Weren't there two different versions of Ghost?
Does Starfox 2 count? Canceled in 1995 but got an official release on the SNES Classic
No because it did eventually get an official release.
@@JaidynReimanBut it WAS a leaked game for many years.
The retail version of star fox 2 for snes was cancelled in favor of star fox 64, but it was included in snes classic and on snes software: nintendo switch online on the Nintendo switch.
@@NJBization That's what *r5LgxTbQ* said. Why are you repeating what they said back to them?
@@Schwarzorn it was more for clarity, the physical version of star fox 2 for SNES still did not gotten release in any region, nor did super Mario 64: Rumble pak edition(updated version) on North America and pal region. The latter would be a blockbuster rental only like clay fighter: sculptor’s cut should it does gotten release in North America during the 90s.
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on the Game Com is one of the strangest and most fascinating cancelled games that were found recently. It was pretty damn ambitious, too.
Link’s Crossbow Training was the first Zelda game I ever played for some reason
Not a bad starting point. It all gets better and better from there… until you reach the top (but that requires buying a functional Phillips CD-i)
@@LeonSKennedy7777 Too true. Zelda's Adventure is a severely underrated gem.
@@totalradlad I'm partial to "Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon", but both CD-i games are legendary-tier.
The one game I wish you had mentioned was Diddy Kong Pilot. I know some aspects like track layouts and music are very similar to what we ultimately got in Banjo-Pilot, but there are still several aspects that were unique to that original DK identity. It had three different campaigns (Diddy Kong Pilot with Team Kongs, Kremling Pilot with Team Krem, and Cranky Kong Pilot with Team Cranky), aspects like voice lines and (of course) the playable characters, and some other stuff like dogfights for bosses. It's just stuff that's only really in this version. And most of all is that there's a build of it that is basically fully complete, save a few audio glitches, that anyone can play today. What we have with this is basically a whole other DK racing game on the GBA, and I think it deserves some love. I like to think of it as a counterpart to Banjo-Pilot rather than just an earlier version.
(It's also the only DK racing game out there where you can play as Klaptrap, and I think that's pretty neat. It's worth it just for Klaptrap.)
Also, one of the four Kremlings that you can play as is called Kritter, but it's just straight-up Krunch from Diddy Kong Racing with a southern accent. So that's something.
Dinosaur Planet complete on the N64 is truly a GEM among rocks to look forward for when it is fully fixed !!!!
I hope Rare releases it as an N64 cart because i want to support the developers.
@@LeonSKennedy7777 Would be awesome but chanses to that are extremely thin. To much costs and Rare/Microsoft would need to find a parter who is willing to do that publishing & manufacturing.
One of the most interesting cut games in my opinion was another for the Dreamcast, half for what it intended to be, and the other half for the extremely unfortunate reason as to it's cancellation. The game is titled Propeller Arena, it doesn't belong to any franchise (that I know of) but it was made and set to be published by Sega, with the release date of September 19th, 2001. Judging by the title and release date it's easy to piece together why it was cancelled, but to go more in-depth Propeller Arena was Sega's take on Ace Combat. It would feature sprawling maps to have dogfights in with classic WW2 airplanes, taking place in the future where a contest is held requiring these old planes to win a big prize. There was intended online features, different modes, characters, unlockables, etc. and the game was dumped in full online a few years back. It is 100% complete, which raises the question as to why it was canned.
Well as it would happen, the game had a stage early on that happened to be a metropolis stage, where you held dogfights in a city somewhat similar to New York City, and you could fly your plane into buildings (which would destroy the plane, not the building), and the game was slated for release 8 days after 9/11 would occur. Sega, in full panic mode suddenly with a game that would look really bad on their end to release right after a global tragedy like 9/11, decided to scrap the project, possibly seeking a later date to release it but giving up as it would only be by February of 2002 that they would officially end the Dreamcast in the west. In the end the game never got to see the light of day officially, even though it's a really solid game that would be seen today as a classic on the platform if it got it's chance. Hopefully one day Sega will re-release it like they have with other cancelled projects, but since it doesn't belong to any franchise it's definitely less likely.
Couple others I'd mention: Resident Evil on the Game Boy Color. Very ambitious title that got really close to release but was cut short. It wasn't finished, but you can find leaked copies online. Castlevania Resurrection and Ecco the Dolphin: Sentinels of the Universe, two more Dreamcast games that never got a chance but did get somewhat far in.
There is also a Resident Evil 1 for the GBC
I think the same people did a demo for resident evil 2 on GBA!🤯
11:43 The original PC release of Half-Life also had the two load screens between getting off the train and getting into the main building.
Dinosaur Planet has gotten a lot of community patches and fixes since it first leaked out as of Febuary 2021, if you look around you'll find it and while the game's still missing a couple levels, cutscenes and there are some unfinished sections where you're likely to crash the game (especially towards the end), it's pretty much semi-playable start to finish!
You'll also find as well that Dinosaur Planet has way more content planned for it than what it ultimately shipped for SFA.
19:54 The minecart levels in Captain Toad Treasure Tracker is basically that.
As cool as it is to see the last 2 builds of Sonic Xtreme, it's obvious why it was cancelled. 3D games were improving so fast they they never would have caught up at the rate they were going, especially with the Dreamcast on the horizon. It was already 96, and Sonic Adventure only came out 2 years later in 98.
The 1st engine worked but didn't feel very fast and the camera perspective obscures a lot of the level (which explains the fish-eye used in other builds). The 2nd is a lot faster and smoother but it looks like they would have had to rebuild the game completely to work with the new mechanics. It wouldn't surprise me if it was another engine built in parallel after they noticed the limitations of the original one.
While you remembered Half life for the Dreamcast you forgot about Propeller Arena also for the Dreamcast. I've always heard both mentioned when people bring up lost Dreamcast games and it was leaked as well.
Hoping that some of the cancelled Crash Bandicoot games get leaked sometime
Need an episode 2 to this. I feel like there are so many more great unreleased games that are playable out there
This is so cool, I love seeing unreleased games! It's such a fascinating look at things. Rayman 4 especially, it very much looks like the missing story link that was meant to lead into Raving Rabbids (R4 they're invading, RR they're forcing you to be a gladiator in weird mini-games).
I played the N64 Dinosaur Planet beta that leaked a while ago and I actually had a better time than with Star Fox Adventure on the Game Cube.
I always felt that the "Star Fox elements" in Star Fox Adventures were poorly put together and put in at the last minute, plus I really hated how they cut Krystal's entire campaign (in Dinosaur Planet she is one of the main characters while in Star Fox Adventure she is imprisoned in a crystal for almost the entire game) and this ended up making the game unpleasant for both Star Fox fans and adventure game fans in general.
I really feel that if they had followed through with the original idea of Dinosaur Planet on the Nintendo 64, the game today would be seen as the RARE classic that closed the Nintendo 64 era with a flourish, the game is extremely fun, the story is interesting , the gameplay is good and have that "Ocarina of Time feeling", the visuals are impressive for what the Nintendo 64 can do, I've never seen a game as beautiful on the console as this.
It's a shame that in the end it ended up becoming a Star Fox game for the Game Cube that not even Star Fox fans like.
This. I loved Starfox Adventures, and it had nothing to do with the Starfox elements (despite also being a Starfox fan). Dinosaur Planet would have been iconic had it been released in its true form.
In a good reality, the n64 would have had Majoras Mask, Kirby 64, Mother 3, Dinosaur Planet among others as it's finishing games. An all out bang I'd warrant
@@oi6915I still dream of the day a Mother 3/Earthbound 64 beta leaks.
As the game appeared to the public 3 times and was playable 2 of them, I'm sure there is a cartridge with a beta out there.
Let's not fool ourselves and think it would be all sunshines and rainbows like we do. If we take a look around, we see things like General Scales still ends up finished off without a boss fight (so much so, that Scales gets his spine snapped in a cutscene). Ultimately getting clowned on.
Which would have been the final product for Dinosaur Planet, where as initial development plans showed they would of had a boss fight in mind. Which ends up being different for planning for Star Fox Adventures plot for General Scales, where they also had a boss fight planned for that, but was scrapped due to time crunch from Microsoft's buyout. While Dinosaur Planet's development had no such reason to remove a fight with General Scales to begin with, where as Adventures at least had an excuse.
And that's all this ultimately ends up boiling down to, is that Star Fox Adventures had more potential gameplay in mind. With more plans and designs from Dinosaur Planet that probably would have transferred over to Star Fox Adventure, considering how much of it is already Dinosaur Planet gameplay wise. A lot of the game is the way it is, is due to rushed development because of the situation of the buyout. So there's no telling how good it would have actually been as a fully finished product, just like with Dinosaur Planet.
Finally, according to what is found out in interviews the past year, or so, that Star Fox would have ended up as an "Adventure" style game anyways, with or without Dinosaur Planet. So honestly, who would you rather handle that kind of game, Nintendo themselves, or Rare Ware?
@@byronlyons3548Nah, I really think things would have been a lot different if they had gone with the original Dinosaur Planet idea on the N64 instead of turning it into Star Fox game for the Game Cube.
I follow the Dinosaur Planet restoration project very closely and I can say with certainty that so far I have had a way better experience with Dinossaur Planet than with Star Fox Adventures. (and this actually made me see how the changes they made to Star Fox Adventure really weren't really that good and some of them really feels kinda rushed)
Furthermore, there is the fact that practically all RARE games for the Nintendo 64 became classics, this game was basically the most ambitious game on the Nintendo 64 hardware (perhaps only behind Mother 3 which was also never released) and one of the few games that makes good use of the Expansion Pak, I really doubt that if Dinosaur Planet had continued on the Nintendo 64 it wouldn't be remembered as an ambitious classic that closed the Nintendo 64 cycle with a flourish.
But like I said before, instead it ended up becoming a forgettable game for the Game Cube that even Star Fox fans don't like.
Ray Man 4 and Golden Eye 360 were new for me, honestly shocked. I've been wanting Ray Man 4 for 20 years.
I feel _SO BAD_ for Climax. Like, I'm a fan of theirs because I've seen the quality they can put out - I grew up playing Sudeki, loved Silent Hill Shattered Memories, and recently have even seen them do a REALLY GOOD _licensed game_ for Dreamworks Dragons (seriously, if you're a fan of old-school top-down Zelda/Mana/Alundra-style games, check out Dragons: Dawn of the New Rider. Can't recommend it enough)... but they're still mostly unknown. None of their games are _huge_ hits, and high profile games with the potential to break out like Elder Scrolls Travels or Legacy of Kain Dead Sun get *cancelled.* Seriously, how can you not feel for 'em? They've got so much talent and still struggle for recognition...
Also, thank you for making me aware of that squeaky, farty chicken in Glover 2. lmao. 😄
Great video!
A Free Radical Battlefront 3 sounds like it would have been elite ☹️
Very happy to see Rayman 4 here, I too watched that trailer RELIGIOUSLY
I knew nothing of the Rayman 4 game. That was quite the surprise.
I can't be the only one that saw Rayman and thought Rayman 2's original 2D build? WAIT! -Realisation- Does Ubisoft hate even numbers? Rayman 2's original version got scrapped and cancelled, and then a new Rayman 2 was made. And Rayman 4 got scraped in just the concept stage, cancelled, and then ANOTHER Rayman 4 (The one that got leaked) was in development and THAT also got scrapped and another game made instead.... Wow... Also yes.. Rayman 4 was cancelled..... Not once... But TWICE!
Hopefully we get to play Twelve Tales one day.
So, I'm guessing the final Sonic Xtreme build was the one done using the Nights engine, or at least, was the one most obviously made using it, the one that made Yuji Naka (I think) rage and threaten to quit (I think)
If nothing else, that would explain the sudden change in appearance over just four days...
Unless, we were to find out that the rendering engine in the earlier demos were also poached from Nights, in which case, well, I can't explain otherwise how there could be that much of a difference in just four days between demos.
South Park on the GameBoy was pretty great to finally play. Remember seeing tiny screen shots in an old magazine then never heard about it again
Everytime I see a GVG video about a super specific yet interesting subject, it's always you Jon! First the Mii's on DS and PSP GPS videos and now this one!! I don't know how you do it, keep doing it!
Sonic also had a canceled educational game called Sonic's Edusoft for the Master System that is also fully playable. While the game is not that interesting It uses sprites from the Mega Drive/Genesis version of Sonic 1, and that's neat.
There is also the arcade game SEGASonic Bros. A puzzle game that is basically a mix of tetris with the special stages of sonic 3, in fact, the Special Stage music from Sonic 3 is in fact originally from SEGASonic Bros. Both games were dated from 1991 and SEGASonic has unused sprites of Vector, a character that would only be seen in game in 1995.
Beta Restoration is its own category of Rom hack. I'd like to play Resident Evil 1.5 some day. And similarly I've seen Zelda 64 projects trying to build full games out of ancient screenshots and footage from before Ocarina's release.
I always love how I'm immediately able to tell if a video is from Jon or not when seeing it pop up in my sub feed.
There's so many canceled games that got releases. Even official releases, such as Counter-Strike: Condition-Zero's Ritual Entertainment version - released as a bonus "Deleted Scenes" with the offiical release. Duke Nukem Forever's 2001 version got released. Several prototype games for consoles, Final Fantasy II English on NES, Diddy Kong Pilot on GBA, etc. etc.
The cancelled game I won't get over is Wild. That E3 2014 trailer looked so cool! I still hope it will resurface someday.
I’m surprised you didn’t bring up games like Castlevania Ressurection, but I suppose we would still be there all day if you brought up more of them.
Not mentioned is: Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors for Sega CD. A fully finished version of this game leaked and is playable. Sadly, I personallt don't have a way to play Sega CD games, but this game looks fantastic.
Primal Rage 2! The big humans are goofy, but some of the animations are really good
Another example of a cancelled game being playable: The location test build of Dan-Ku-Ga, the sequel to Kaiser Knuckle, is fully playable right now with online on Fightcade. If you're into fighting games in any capacity, definitely check it out, there's even an active community who has latched onto it and even brought it to Frosty Faustings as a side event in 2024 (Also I think Taito themselves technically released this build on a mini console a few years back)
Battlefront 3 being brought up and how it's story was reused for Elite Squadron on the DS and PSP is funny considering the recent episode of the Bad Batch toyed with the idea of a force-sensitive clone, just like the lead of Elite Squadron.
Maybe whenever they release another remaster of Twilight Princess, Nintendo could include an HD port of Crossbow Training as a bonus.
Early builds mean a lot as the fans can have a feel and see the intended vision to possibly complete it
Rayman Raving Rabbids is such an odd thing. The main project got turned into a minigame collection but the GBA was a platformer that used a lot of elements from an even earlier version of Rayman 4, the one in the DS was pretty much a straight adaptation of the game that was shown and we never got, and then the J2ME version by Gameloft was just A Rayman platformer that seemed to only have gotten concept art of the enemies and not much else because the game has little to do with anything else in the franchise and the gameplay is more inspired by Sonic than previous Rayman games.
It's like Ubisoft never bothered to tell the external studios that the main game had a drastic change in direction, or even check on what they were doing.
Just imagine how much the internet would lose their minds if the cancelled version of Earthbound 64 was leaked online.
The reason that last sonic xtreme build was on another engine so soon is because it was planned that the boss battles would use a different engine than the main game
Always glad to see a Jon video in the feed
Holy crap i didn't know about Dinosaur Planet!!
Similar to Biohazard 2, Pokemon Gold and Silver has an unreleased beta that made it online a few years ago. It has ~40 different Pokemon, some of which were eventually revisited in future generations, and a completely different map based on the entirety of Japan rather than a singular region. Some ROM hackers have made it a playable game and it’s a pretty fun alternate Gen 2 experience.
Now someone needs to find Earthbound 64.
E3 2001 build of Duke Nukem Forever is a glaring omission from this video.
I wish factor 5 would “accidentally” leak their Wii Star Wars lightsaber game. Also Ecco 2 dev build on Dreamcast is pretty cool.
First time watching one of your vids.I really like your format, and the style you've chosen to use.Impressed.Subscribed!
Now if only someone could get their hands on that playable version of Twelve Tales: Conker 64…sigh!
link's crossbow training played better without the zapper
I think you should make a follow-up video to this. There's even More unreleased games you can play now. Like Vectorman 3 on the PS2, for example.
Who would’ve thought, Sonic had a Screw Attack move!
I assume they had multiple level types or engine tests for Sonic Extreme. It's hard to say if "only 4 days apart" actually matters for those builds. In the super early alpha stages, they probably had developers doing a kind of "game jam" (as we call them) to just make a simple ring demo. Whatever felt the most playable might have been the selected direction. But I assume Sega thought they were all kinda bad lmao.
Look at similar titles at the time: Tomb Raider had slow movement and confined spaces. Croc and Jumping Flash had tiny little level areas.
Mario 64's massive levels were a huge deal. Sonic requires insane amounts of level space due to the speed aspect.
That's the genius behind Crash Bandicoot and its level streaming tech. I think a Crash Bandicoot - style would have been the direction had Sega known it existed.
They use a similar tech in Boost Trilogy games with the Hedgehog engine by procedurally generating seconds of background elements, quite similar to how Factor 5 acheived the Death Star trench run.
I think the Saturn existed just a few years too early for Sega to make it shine, in terms of techniques and knowledge.
The Oblivion game on PSP is so fascinating to me because looking at the game makes you realize that it looks better than the original game in some ways. Ie lighting and blood effects, some of the animations look a little better to me, like they're more fluid and weighty.
The Glover Hub Chicken reminds me a lot of the voice fx in Yooka-Laylee.
That RE 1.5 bit... It really irks me that there's people out there who, in a misguided bid to feel superior to others, decide to hoard a piece of gaming history instead of sharing it with the world. Like, this isn't exactly the Mona Lisa. You can just dump the game files and still claim to have the original master. Kinda reminds me of how someone in Japan won a auction for an unreleased, undumped game and decided it was gonna stay in his private collection forever.
I was hoping you were going to say there was a build of Rayman 4 before the nightmare beasts came into it.
It's the GCN Kirby adventure for me
My cancelled game I lamented was the 'B.C.' for the original Xbox. No one seems to have much info on it. The only thing I still have is an Xbox magazine demo disk with footage that proves it actually existed.
Was that the game that was like a strategy games and you helped civilization grow in dinosaur times?
sonic stomp is just a changed bounce ring when you think about it.
I’d die happy if someone could get a hold of the playable versions of Tomba 3 and Megaman Legends 3 and release them
Sadly one is lost to time, and the other is locked up in Capcom’s game vault and may never get released
I wish Glover 2 was finished and released. That game looks incredible fun. ❤
0:12 Cranck the weasel is that game for me
there an playable demo build also contains several assets to peak out inside.
i've accepted at this point that i will be huffing copium forever, but i am still holding out hope for ushiro (level-5). i bought all the light novels, read the manga when it was serialised, and i'm still waiting for the switch revival. but at this point i think it's only me and a legally-distinct volleyball with a face still waiting.
Only cancelled game I want to play is the original PREY 2.
i hope earthbound 64 gets leaked one day
Dinosaur planet had such a more serious tone to it, I kinda wish it stayed the course on n64
Gotta shout out Sutte Hakkun GB. Great Puzzle game for the GBC (there's a DMG build too) that plays well and looks beautiful, but never came out. One of my highlights of the Gigaleak, to be honest.
If Star Fox 2 got released on the snes it would have changed the whole landscape of gaming. Jon should do a video on how it inspired elements of Mario64 and ocarina of time
I so wish we could've gotten Rayman 4... I remember being a young Rayman fan and being so sorely disappointed by Raving Rabbids; and the leaked build of Rayman 4 seems like everything I would've wanted from the next mainline Rayman _and more._ I just hope that we can eventually get an official Rayman 4, even if it's less Rabbid-filled than the one we could have had.
Ever since I was a kid I’ve desperately wanted to play DEMONIK from the movie Grandmas Boy. My mother knew I loved video games so she showed me the movie when I was extremely young 😭 I had know idea what 90% of the jokes and scenes even meant 😅 90s parents bro I can’t
I loved Link's Crossbow Training!
Actually the version of rayman 4 (raving rabbids) is not the rayman 4 that Phoenix studio was working on, we don't actually have any builds of that to my knowledge, just concept art
rayman 4 looks incredible! woudlve been an all time 3d platformer if it came out and was developed further, thanks for sharing jon :)
surprised there was no mention of the Half-Life 2 beta. especially with the new mega patches that allows a lot of the maps to be playable.
It's a good one to mention but since it's not a cancelled game it doesn't count I guess, unlike say the cancelled Dreamcast port of hl1 despite it being mostly the same game as goldsrc with Blue Shift included before they seperated it for pc release
@@oi6915 True. though I think you could make a argument that it could still fit. given how radically different the beta was to hl2's retail. so much of it was changed it's virtually a different game aside from characters and certain plot points.
Dinosaur Planet has always fascinated me. I wonder what it could have been like without needing to arbitrarily insert Starfox into it. Would have allowed more creative freedom I’m sure.
Thats... Basically Oblivion on a psp. That would have blown my tiny little mimd i think.
I'd love to see another crack at a 3D Rayman game, but knowing modern Ubisoft it would be another open world game with a glut of repetitive side activities and filler.
It would be really cool if fans complete Dinosaur Planet one day. It's in the realm of possibility.
Need those Soul Reaver alphas thelostworlds and rainaaudron showed off o their channels. Mother 64, Prey 2, any of those bioshock infinite "demos", Soul Reaver 2 air forge demo for dreamcast, just to name a few. Played half life for dreamcast on real hardware with the mouse and keyboard, those framerates and loading screens alongside using a whole vmu for saves made it less convenient, but a decent experience. The actual controller support for dreamcast is horrendous.
Hope twelve tales conker 64 and one of the many team fortress 2 prototypes join this list eventually
True Fantasy Life Online for the original Xbox is the one I always wished had been able to come out
I'm surprised Mother 1 wasn't brought up in this video! Great video as always, Jon!
Probably because it was officially released later on Wii U.
@@helliboss he talked about Golden Axed and that got released on Steam
I guess the game came out in Japan just fine, technically only the localization was cancelled, not the game itself. But I guess stuff like Dinosaur Planet wasn't really cancelled either. Star Fox 2 would've been a good Nintendo pick, though.