About
1 Feb 2008Please, before enjoying the U64 Archive, keep in mind that:
- Most of the U64 articles are written by italians and people from other non-english countries.
- There are probably a lot of english-errors in our articles.
- We are just a bunch of geeks that try to preserve media and infos about games that could be lost and forgotten.
- We work on U64 in our free-time.
- We dont have much free-time.
- We do the best we can with our limited free-time.
How did U64 became to be ?
[short version] Unseen 64 is a project born in 2001, from the mind of some italian friends: after years looking at Nintendo 64 games that never came out or that were released with many differences from the preview version, they decided to make an archive about them, to preserve somehow all those changes in the development. This explain the origin of the “64″ in the name, but after years of collecting beta stuff, the archive grown bigger and bigger, taking much more than some Nintendo 64 games.
We have just left the original Unseen 64 name, because we were affected to it. There would be so many things to talk about, all the wonderful stories of these sexy beta-geeks and their site of games that will never be, but we are not really that good in telling stories.. especially in english. So that’s all! We just hope that you are going to appreciate all the hours we lost in collecting this stuff.
Who’s behind U64?
This site is just an archive for beta, cancelled and unseen videogames. The site is made for beta-fans by beta-fans, so everyone can contribute to the archive, for preserving the history and changes in the videogames development. If you would like to know the main staff that work hard on the site, check the Unseen 64 Staff page.
Why it’s important to preserve unseen games?
It’s interesting to see what developers had originally in mind for their projects. Why forget cancelled games? We’ll never be able to enjoy them. Every change makes a different gaming experience for us… we would like to save some documents about this evolution for curiosity, historic and artistic preservation.
Where did you find all these screens and videos?
Google is your friend! You can find almost everything with Google. We are collecting beta screens & videos from many years and even friends and contributors send screens & videos to us: for a lot of this stuff we dont remember or know the original source! We are sorry if there are some images or videos on the site without any credit, so if you know for certain their source, just send us an e-mail and we will update the article with the source, or if you want we will delete them!
Why some articles are in italian or in a weird engrish?
Keep in mind that most of the content of U64 is written by italians and people from other non-english countries, we are sorry if there are still a lot of english errors in our articles and descriptions! But we hope to be able to correct them in the future.. and to find more english people for the staff.. would you like to help? :)
How did U64 became to be ?
[long version] It all started in Italy in 1999. Monokoma and some other Italian geeks obsessed with the Nintendo 64 were starting to notice that many of their favorite N64 games were nothing like the old screenshots that were published in magazines before their release (different graphic, removed places and characters, etc.). We started to save old screenshots from those N64 games, to contemplate the differences and discuss about them for hours.
One game especially had our attention, Zelda Ocarina of Time: it was meant to be released for the 64 Disc Drive, but after many delays when it came out for the N64 most of its features and places from the 64DD version were removed. We hunted through the web to find more and more early Zelda 64 screens, from official websites and fansites: in one of those fansites there was a nice section named “Unseen Zelda” about the removed stuff in Ocarina of Time. It was cool to know that there were more people interested in the original Zelda 64.
In the following couple of years we had already a big collection of screens and videos from beta and cancelled Nintendo 64 games, but it was nothing more than a chaotic directory in our PCs. In 2000 we created a fansite about Perfect Dark, because of our love for its multiplayer mode. In that Perfect Dark website, we decided to open a little section where to organize better all those files with beta and cancelled N64 games, to share them with other geeks that could have been interested. Taking inspiration from that nice “Unseen Zelda” page, we decided to name the section “Unseen 64” as it had much more unseen Nintendo 64 games than just Ocarina of Time. The Unseen 64 page in the PDX website can be considered as the first version of our website.
We were slowing finding out that there were even more geeks interested in games that were never released, as in the wonderful Assembler Games Forum, full of collectors of prototypes. Another great “unseen gaming” website from the old days was “The Strange (and Rare) Videogame Pics Page“, made by another Italian guy.
In 2001 monokoma was addicted with Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast, and looking back at the early videos and screenshots from the game, he found out that there were many elements removed from the final PSO. Ehy, there were unseen games for the Dreamcast too! Along with monokoma’s website dedicated to PSO, there was a page full of screenshots and concept arts for the removed content, know as “PSO Unseen“. Another unseen Dreamcast game that took our interest was “Project Berkley” aka “Virtua Fighter RPG”, the project that was later released as Shen Mue.. even if they cancelled most of its original 16 chapters.
In 2000 / 2001, it was announced that Eternal Darkness (developed by Silicon Knights), one of the most interesting cancelled Nintendo 64 games, would have been resurrected and released for the new Nintendo GameCube. Even Too Human, a Silicon Knights project that was started as a Playstation 1 game in 1993, was then planned to be released in 2003 / 2004 for the new Nintendo console. Monokoma was fascinated by Too Human, a game which development was still not finished after 10 years, with a cancelled PSX version and a mysterious GC port. Too Human is a real unseen gem, that was finally released only in 2008, for the Xbox 360.. and it was not really the same game that they promised back in 2001. Anyway, at the end of 2001 monokoma created a new fansite dedicated to the Too Human Project, with a nice gallery for the cancelled Playstation version.
In 2002, our collection of beta screenshots had many directories with N64, Dreamcast and Playstation “unseen” games, but we were too lazy to update frequently the “Unseen 64″ section on the Perfect Dark website. In the meantime, the Nintendo 64 was dead and we moved to the GameCube.. and in November 2002, Eternal Darkness was finally released in Italy. After finishing ED, monokoma created another site “Eternal Unseen” dedicated to the cancelled N64 version and the removed content from the GC version.
In 2003 we closed down the Perfect Dark websites, but we still had many visitors in there just for the Unseen 64 page. In the meantime monokoma organized a page about the development of the Zelda 64 project because there was too much confusion on the soon-to-be-released Zelda: Master Quest on the GameCube. Master Quest was seen by many as the original Zelda URA that was meant to be released for the Nintendo 64DD, but in reality it was just a tiny part of the real 64DD project.
Later we found many other websites and communities about lost games, as Frank Cifaldi’s Lost Levels and X-Cult: it was nice to see so many gamers with our same love for games that we’ll never able to play. It was possible to talk with more and more people interested to find and share documents about those unseen games.
Still, there was not a comprehensive archive to preserve all those beta screens, videos and info in a single place. At the end of 2003 we had: an “Unseen 64″ section on a dead website, a “PSO Unseen” page, a site dedicated to the unseen Too Human Project, another site for the “Eternal Unseen”, an article about the unseen development of “Zelda 64″ and some GBs of screenshots and videos with beta & cancelled games for various consoles.
Yeah, it was clear that it was time to organize all that mess in a single website. That is when the current “Unseen 64″ became to be, initially as an ugly series of pages made in html with Office Front-Page. We decided to keep the name “Unseen 64″ because we were affected to it, even if the site had more than some cancelled Nintendo 64 games.
The site was online and we worked on it on-and-off through 2004 and 2005, but there were only screenshots in the archive, as our free-server was limited and it was impossible to upload videos in there.
In 2006 monokoma finally opened a Youtube Channel where to share beta videos with everyone. Somehow thanks to Youtube, U64 became even more popular among gaming geeks, and in 2007 we received various emails from people that wanted to incorporate our little archive in their bigger sites. We were scared to lose our “freedom” so usually we replied with a “No, but thanks!”.
In October 2007 monokoma got in contact with MAIcrosoft, a guy from Netherlands that offered us to hosting Unseen 64 on his webserver and pay for a real domain name. We chatted with Mai for some time, and he seemed reliable and crazy enough to start a good collaboration between Italy and Netherlands. We worked together to upgrade the old html website into a better Worpress-powered archive, and finally in April 2008 the “new U64″ was online! Thanks to Wordpress it’s faster and easier to write and share articles, so we were able to have daily-updates to preserve more and more unseen games. More people joined the U64 Staff and with their help the U64 Community started to grown.
In May 2009 we had a graphic redesign for the website, so now it looks even better and more “professional”. With the current economic crisis many software house are closing down and that means even more cancelled games that should be preserved in the U64 archive. It’s not easy to keep up with all these updates and to contact so many people, so probably we’ll have to find some serious help in the next few years if we want to continue to archive all those new unseen games.
Clicca qui per la versione in Italiano ▼
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