Atlus

Cosmic System [NES / Famicom – Cancelled]

Cosmic System is a cancelled NES / Famicom Disk System sci-fi RPG that was in development sometime in the late 80s by WaveJack / Imagineer / Atlus. Only a single screenshot was published in Famimaga magazine (April issue) when developers made some kind of contest asking to the readers to send character designs that would have been used for their new game.

It seems this contest was quite a success: they received 23.141 drawings of which they selected a bunch of winners that would seen their designs remade in pixel art for the project. Something went wrong during the development and in the end Cosmic System was never released.

There are probably hundreds of lost Famicom games we’ll never seen a single screenshot of, so we can say we were already lucky with Cosmic System.

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Dota-kun no Bouken Roman [NES – Cancelled]

Dota-kun no Bouken Roman is a cancelled side scrolling platform / action game that was in development for the Famicom / NES that was produced by Atlus and was going to be published by Imagineer. There are basically no info about Dota Kun’s gameplay, but we can look at some scans that were uploaded on a japanese website. On GDRI we can read some more info on the development:

Dota-kun no Bouken Roman (“Dota’s Romantic Adventure”) is some sort of side-scrolling action game that was to be published under Imagineer’s WaveJack Jr. label. It was based on an MSX game by SystemSoft. You can see ads and screenshots here. The point is, I asked Esaki if it was developed by Atlus (because I suspected it was). He said it was produced by Atlus, but it was programmed outside the company. That seems to have been a common practice for Atlus, especially in the early days.

Thanks to Celine for the contribution!

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Ultimate Domain [Arcade – Cancelled]

Ultimate Domain was a 3D fighting game in development by Atlus for Sega’s Model 2 board around 1996. The game had 8 characters ( of which 3 were women ) animated with the aid of JAC ( Japan Action club ) for the motion capture sessions. One peculiar feature was the SOL-POWER where the characters can utilise the sun power to charge up super killing techniques ( just like Daitarn 3 ! ). Ultimate Domain doesn’t appear on Atlus or Model 2 release lists so we can conclude that it was never fully released in the arcades.

Scan from Computer & Videogames issue 181.

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Untitled Fantasy Multiplayer Game [PS2 – Cancelled?]

In 2000 Atlus was working on a fantasy themed multiplayer game for the PlayStation 2, but as far as we know, this project was never released. In September 2010, 7HeroesForceBattle posted a scan from an old PSM article on the Lost Levels Forum that showed a single screenshot of this mysterious game. As was written in the thread:

It doesn’t seem to match up with any Atlus games, but he noted that the creature pictured bears a striking resemblence (at least from the back) to the classic Cerberus design from the Megami Tensei series.

If someone recognizes this game, please let us know!

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Widget [NES – Not Beta, but an arrow!]

Update: as noted by Ian and Yakumo, the “4” is an arrow!

Widget was developed by Atlus in 1992, for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was based off the short-lived cartoon series of the same name. Upon analyzing the game’s instruction manual, TheActionGameMaster spotted a minor difference in the password screen on the twelfth page, which discusses the game’s extended play features. In the manual, there are seven digits to be inputted. It reads “5,2,5,7,142”. In the final game, you may only input six digits on the password screen. This minor difference suggests that the photograph in the manual was taken from a later build of the game, or that it was some sort of tester’s code.