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Daredevil for PS2 would've been something special.
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00:00Lost Media is undeniably intriguing.
00:02After all, the big hits and misses alike are etched into video game history for all to look back on,
00:08but what about the games that almost didn't make it at all?
00:11I'm Sy for WhatCulture.com and here are 10 Lost video games that were discovered years later.
00:16Number 10, Echo 2, Sentinels of the Universe.
00:19Sega developed a host of memorable franchises in the early 90s
00:23that included Sonic the Hedgehog, Alex Kidd, Streets of Rage,
00:26and perhaps the most overlooked of them all, Echo the Dolphin.
00:29Between 1992 and 1995, the franchise had three installments
00:33that all received rather consistent critical and commercial acclaim.
00:36When Sega braved new waters with the Dreamcast system,
00:39the majority of their established IPs never got a chance to shine on their 128-bit machine.
00:45However, Echo was one of the few that made it across with the 2000 reboot, Defender of the Future.
00:50Again, there were rave reviews, and as such, developers Appaloosa Interactive got to work on a follow-up.
00:55However, fans had no idea that this was even the case for years,
00:58as the sequel was cancelled before it was even announced,
01:01thanks to the Dreamcast's unfortunate discontinuation.
01:05A prototype was discovered in 2007,
01:07but it took another nine years before a copy was released to the public.
01:11Echo 2, Sentinels of the Universe,
01:13looks impressive for a game at a suggested 30% completion,
01:16but it's hard to know how it would have turned out for sure,
01:18considering how much is missing.
01:20However, Sentinels of the Universe is of particular note,
01:23because aside from the 2002 PS2 port of Defender of the Future,
01:27Sega's bottlenose friend has otherwise been lost at sea for 23 years in counting.
01:32Number 9, Lobo.
01:33If you're a more casual fan of DC comic book characters,
01:36you might be at least aware of Lobo,
01:37thanks to his appearance as a DLC fighter in Injustice Gods Among Us.
01:42However, if it wasn't for its ultimate cancellation,
01:44this wouldn't have been Lobo's first video game brawler.
01:47After Lobo's unexpected growth in popularity in the 90s,
01:50Ocean Software picked up the license and put a team to work on constructing a fighting game
01:54starring the violent alien and a series of his enemies.
01:57Lobo was undoubtedly inspired by Killer Instinct's pre-rendered graphics
02:00and the success of Mortal Kombat,
02:02as each character had a violent finishing move,
02:04as described in a few gaming magazines at the time.
02:07However, despite the marketing starting up, the game never released.
02:11There was talk of prototype Lobo cartridges existing in collector's forums for years,
02:15but it took over a decade for ROMs of both the Mega Drive
02:17and Super Nintendo versions of the game to appear online in 2008 and 2009.
02:23The quality of these is surprisingly high,
02:25making it untimely cancellation sting for fans of the genre and the character.
02:29It remains the only official Lobo video game to this day,
02:32even in its unofficially released state.
02:358. Radical Dreamers
02:36Nintendo have taken part in quite a few odd hardware and software experiments over the years,
02:41but the Satellaview is truly out there.
02:43Essentially a cable modem attached to the SNES,
02:46this Japan-exclusive peripheral allowed gamers to tune in at certain times of the day
02:50for unique gaming experiences that would otherwise never be made available.
02:54One of these was Radical Dreamers,
02:56a 1996 visual novel adventure game that was a surprisingly weird choice
03:00for a sequel to one of the all-time JRPG greats, Chrono Trigger.
03:04Radical Dreamers stars Kid and Surge from the sequel Chrono Cross,
03:08as well as an amnesiac version of Magus from Chrono Trigger called Magi.
03:12Luca from Chrono Trigger also gets a mention as meeting her untimely fate in general,
03:16the story is a darker departure from the other entries in the series.
03:20Although more forgotten than technically lost,
03:22this timed experience local to Japan remained an oddity that most people didn't even know existed.
03:27Square avoided reissuing the game for a long time
03:29due to its incongruous tone with the rest of the series
03:32and what they called questionable demand.
03:34Thankfully, ROMDumps in the 2000s allowed Western fans a taste of Radical Dreamers
03:38before the company finally acquiesced and released it in 2022
03:42as part of a re-release of Chrono Cross.
03:45Number 7, Resident Evil for the Game Boy Color.
03:47Sigh, talking about Resident Evil on this channel,
03:50all of our subscribers saw this coming, does that include you?
03:53There aren't many consoles from 1996 onwards
03:56that don't have some kind of Resident Evil game on them.
03:58Whilst it hasn't been brought forward for quite some time,
04:01the original Resident Evil had three releases for the PlayStation,
04:04shambled its way onto the Sega Saturn and PC,
04:06and eventually took a bite out of the Nintendo DS in 2006.
04:10This final note is particularly important because
04:12A, Deadly Silence is the best version of the game Fight Me,
04:15and B, it marks a happy ending to a tumultuous story
04:18of trying to make Resident Evil an on-the-go experience.
04:22Capcom producer Yoshiki Okamoto was attracted to handheld gaming
04:25which had served Nintendo well through the 90s,
04:28hitting another boom nearing the turn of the millennium
04:30thanks to Pokemon and the Game Boy Color.
04:32Capcom hired UK team Hot Gen, led by Fergus McGovern,
04:35who had previously worked at Probe Entertainment
04:37and had experience in porting arcade games to home consoles.
04:40It was as surely one of the most ambitious but doomed ports of all time.
04:44Moving Resident Evil from PlayStation to Game Boy Color
04:46was a remarkable ask.
04:48Early screenshots looked promising in how faithful they were,
04:51but the release missed several deadlines
04:52and then hit the wall of cancellation.
04:55In 2012, different prototypes of the game were dropped online
04:58which confirmed just how ambitious and how doomed the project was.
05:02It's clear that Resident Evil on Game Boy Color was never going to work,
05:05but it's marvellous that something so bold even existed at all.
05:096. Steven Seagal is the final option
05:11Michael Jackson had Moonwalker, Shaq had Shaq-Fu,
05:14and Steven Seagal nearly had the final option.
05:17In the mid-90s, Tech Magic,
05:19rather than get a license to any of Steven Seagal's films,
05:22decided to craft a brand new side-scrolling beat-em-up adventure
05:25for the direct-to-video star.
05:27However, Seagal's involvement with the game was minimal,
05:29essentially boiling down to selling his likeness.
05:31The rotoscoped character the player takes control of is just a lookalike.
05:35Despite this, Steve Wick, who worked on the game
05:37and went on to develop for the Postal series,
05:39said in an interview with Nintendo Player
05:41that the company ran out of money,
05:42which led to the game's cancellation.
05:44Tech Magic, meanwhile, announced that the final option
05:46was scrapped in favour of a different Seagal game
05:49for PlayStation and N64,
05:50which, unsurprisingly, also never came to be.
05:53Regardless, a prototype version of the final option
05:55got into the hands of an editor at Tips & Tricks magazine,
05:58making its way through several eBay auctions
06:00until it found a preservationist.
06:02The game, originally scheduled for a 1994 release,
06:05became publicly accessible in 2013,
06:07becoming another weird footnote in the career
06:09of a severely weird actor.
06:115. Garage Bad Dream Adventure
06:14Garage Bad Dream Adventure is a unique example on this list
06:17of a game that did get an official release,
06:18but still wound up lost.
06:20Because the game's publisher, Toshiba EMI,
06:22decided to halt CD-ROM production in general,
06:25only 3,000 copies of Garage were originally made.
06:28This made it exceptionally rare and expensive,
06:30and owners of the game were hesitant to upload it
06:32to the internet for fear of Japanese piracy laws.
06:35Garage's strange psychological tone
06:37made it feel especially elusive
06:38compared to other lost games.
06:40The 1999 point-and-click horror
06:41is set inside the mind of a man named Yang,
06:44shown as a capitalist nightmare world
06:46populated by biomechanical beings.
06:48The game's art style feels inspired by the works
06:50of HR Geiger and Junji Ito.
06:52Preservation of Garage came about
06:54via a committed group of fans
06:55who had discovered the game's existence
06:57and began hunting through online Japanese auctions.
07:00In 2014, a user called CC Zero
07:02secured a copy for 77,000 yen,
07:05roughly $550,
07:06and put the game online.
07:08This prompted an English fan patch
07:09to be made years later,
07:10allowing those who had fallen in love
07:12with the twisted world to enjoy it properly.
07:14In 2021, thanks likely in part
07:16to the passion around its search those years ago,
07:19Garage got its first official release
07:20in 20 years for iOS and Android.
07:23Number 4, Aka R.
07:25There are a great many arcade classics
07:27lost to time
07:27and plenty of urban legends around them.
07:29Aka R is one game that was unobtainable
07:31for a long time for both fans
07:33and the company who paid to create it.
07:36In early 1982,
07:37development on Atari's space shooter Aka R wrapped,
07:40and a cabinet was sent to an arcade in Florida
07:42to see how it tested with consumers.
07:44Unfortunately, it was also sent alongside Robotron 2084,
07:48which smoked its contemporary,
07:50causing Aka R to make next to no money.
07:52As such, the game was cancelled
07:53and full production was never pursued.
07:56Only three cabinets were ever made,
07:57and the private owners of the Aka R cabs
07:59never uploaded the ROM to the internet,
08:01denying most of the public the chance to ever play it.
08:04However, in 2019,
08:05the game was dumped anonymously on an arcade forum.
08:08Allegedly, the ROM had been stolen by a tech
08:10who had visited the home of one of the private collectors.
08:13This is pretty grim, if true.
08:15However, now that the ROM had been released,
08:17those who had spent decades wondering about it
08:19could see it for themselves.
08:21Additionally, Atari, who had no backup of the game,
08:23also finally had access to it.
08:25As such, it appears as part of the celebratory collection
08:28Atari 50, finally at home amongst its peers.
08:32Number three, Daredevil, the man without fear.
08:34Before Arkham Asylum revolutionized
08:36superhero video games single-handedly,
08:38we had Treyarch's PS2 Spider-Man titles,
08:41often still described as some of the best comic book video games ever.
08:45However, Spidey was not meant to swing through the gaming sphere alone.
08:48In the early 2000s,
08:49developers' 5,000 foot pitch for a Daredevil game
08:52was approved by Marvel,
08:53and they began in earnest on their first open-world adventure.
08:56The titular hero was able to complete side missions
08:58on the way to his main objectives,
09:00using a shadow world to take advantage of Daredevil's senses
09:03to find enemies and heat sources.
09:05Apparently, the development of Daredevil was pretty rough,
09:08in particular as it morphed over time
09:09with the announcement of the Ben Affleck-led film entering production.
09:13This meant producers Encore, Marvel, and Sony Pictures
09:16all required approvals on everything the studio did.
09:19There was an engine switch,
09:20the open world was scrapped in favour of being a linear brawler,
09:23costs ballooned,
09:24and there were even alleged drug abuse allegations at the studio.
09:27In 2020, video game preservationist P2P Online
09:30uploaded a video of the 2003 build of Daredevil,
09:33which reignited interest.
09:35Then, three years later, a 2004 build was discovered.
09:38Fans worked together to make this version
09:40best described as somewhat finished,
09:42playable, unearthing a gem from nearly 20 years ago
09:45that most people forgot ever existed.
09:482. Drax Knight Out
09:50Drax Knight Out is a good-humoured little adventure game for the NES,
09:53where the player assists Dracula in leaving his tower
09:55and navigating the town below.
09:57Drax must avoid or trap villagers and suck their blood
10:00whilst searching for his bride Mina.
10:02It's simple, charming fun, never actually released.
10:05The game was expected to drop in 1991,
10:07but despite being almost ready,
10:09it never made it to store shelves.
10:11This is particularly odd,
10:12as it was also tied up in a licensing agreement.
10:15Midway through development,
10:16the producer Parker Brothers had struck a deal with Reebok.
10:19As such, the game became a tie-in for Reebok Pumps,
10:22which Drax can pick up on his travels for extra speed
10:24and, of course, early 90s style.
10:26What's remarkable about this story
10:28is how the game was preserved.
10:30It just so happened that Parker Brothers developer
10:32Rex Bradford lived on the same street
10:33as NES fan Gideon G,
10:35who would borrow the near-final version
10:37of the game's cartridge as a kid
10:38and would wind up keeping it.
10:40As he grew up and got into video game emulation
10:42and preservation,
10:43G realised he had something special in his collection
10:46and made sure the game got online nearly a decade
10:48after it was supposed to be released.
10:51And number one, Akira for the Sega Mega Drive.
10:54Considering the worldwide cultural impact of it,
10:56it's surprising that there haven't been more attempts
10:58at turning 1988 motion picture Akira into video games.
11:02The Japanese Famicom title was poorly received,
11:04but there was an attempt made by THQ in the early 90s
11:07to bring Neo Tokyo to a variety of platforms.
11:10Mega Drive, Sega CD, Game Gear, SNES, and Game Boy.
11:13These were shown to gamers in magazines
11:15and briefly at the 1994 Summer Consumer Electronic Show
11:18before vanishing without a trace.
11:20Behind the scenes,
11:21each version of the game was being cut one by one,
11:24with the Mega Drive version making it the furthest
11:26before also being axed.
11:28And so the game became lost media for two decades
11:30until Boxing Day of 2019,
11:32appropriately the year the film is set,
11:34when a prototype of the Mega Drive version
11:36was uploaded to the internet.
11:38Gamers would finally get a good look at Akira,
11:40even if it was only semi-complete,
11:42to find that its contents are as wide a net
11:44as the original choice of systems.
11:46Each level bounces from one genre to the next,
11:49driving, first-person doom-like exploration,
11:51side-scrolling adventure,
11:52isometric combat, and so on.
11:55It's an appropriately audacious direction
11:56for audacious source material
11:58featuring some stunning cutscenes for the time,
12:01and in retrospect could have been
12:02a late-era Mega Drive classic
12:03if it had made it over the finish line.
12:05Thank goodness we can play these video games again,
12:08because sometimes that's not always the case.
12:10Speaking of which,
12:10there's a video on screen now
12:11for 10 video game moments that you'll never see again.
12:14Thanks for watching,
12:15I've been Cy for WhatCulture,
12:17and have a good week.
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