Video Games You Will Never Play: the Unseen64 Book is now available!

Video Games You Will Never Play: the Unseen64 Book is now available!

Video Games You Will Never Play: the Unseen64 Book is now available!

It’s finally here, after almost two years of work: our book about lost videogames! In this volume you can read about more than 200 cancelled games, starting from early ‘90s computers, to 8-bit games and all the way through to the 7th generation of consoles with Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii. In this book you can find the most interesting cancelled games from the Unseen64 archive plus a few previously unknown lost games, new screenshots and details. For example, in this book you’ll find the full story about the mysterious game cancelled by Bungie because of Halo, concept art from the unseen version of Maximo for Nintendo 64, what happened to Jade Empire 2, the truth about Halo DS, the ambitious action RPG in development by Junction Point Studios before they were acquired by Disney to develop Epic Mickey, the story behind the unreleased Virtual Reality console by Hasbro and a few more surprises. To celebrate this release we also published a huge list with our favorite video games books, check it for more interesting reads!

Here you can download the table of content for our book: Index PDF (400 kb)

video-games-you-will-never-play-unseen64-book-color video-games-you-will-never-play-unseen64-book-blackwhite

Also included are essays about the preservation of unreleased games, articles about how we do researches for Unseen64 and 20 interviews with museums and developers who worked on lost games. This is a crowdsourced book by the whole Unseen64 collective: more than 45 contributors from all over the world worked on the project. The book is almost 500 pages long and the physical cost to print the full-color version is quite high even if we kept the price as low as possible, but we also released a much cheaper black and white version. The black and white version of the book is identical to the color one, the only differences are the cover and the interior color: this black and white version is less than half the price of the full color book (we also earn more on the b/w version!).

You can buy our book on Amazon worldwide:

USA, Full Color Book
USA, Black / White book
United Kingdom, Full Color Book
United Kingdom, Black/White Book
– Brazil, Full Color Book: coming soon?
Brazil, Black/White Book
Canada, Full Color Book
Canada, Black/White Book
Germany, Full Color Book
Germany, Black/White Book
France, Full Color Book
France, Black/White Book
Italy, Full Color Book
Italy, Black/White Book
Spain, Full Color Book
Spain, Black/White Book
– Search your local Amazon website to see if it’s available! You can search for “Video Games You Will Never Play” or “Video Games You Will Never Play Color” for the full-color version.

eBook | Digital Version (PDF)

Patrons who support Unseen64 on Patreon for 5 $ can download the full-color, full-version of our book in PDF! For sure to own the physical version of the book is nicer, but with a PDF more people will be able to read it and this is also a way to thank you for your help on Patreon. It really means a lot, without support on Patreon we would not be able to keep this site online.

New Low Price Edition!

In September 2017 we also started to release a new low-price edition of the book, divided into different volumes, so you can choose your favorite consoles. At the moment the first volume is available, dedicated to cancelled 8 bit and 16 bit games (NES, Master System, Game Boy, Turbografx 16, Super Nintendo and Sega Mega Drive). The content of this edition is the same of the original book (we just fixed some errors), but divided into short books. You can find this new budget edition on Amazon and Createspace:

+ Amazon USA
+ Amazon UK
+ Amazon Italy
+ Amazon Spain
+ Amazon France
+ Amazon Germany
Search your local Amazon website to see if it’s already available!

Please keep in mind that:

  • The lost games featured in this book are just a small sample of all the titles we will never play. It would be impossible to list them all in just one book.
  • This book is published in Good Faith and under Fair Use.
  • This book is fully in English, but most articles were written by Italians and people from other non-English countries. Each article was proofread by English native speakers, but there could still be typos and random engrish.
  • This is a 100% independent project, we worked on this book with our own efforts, time and energies, with a super small budget supported by our Patrons! The book was self published thanks to Amazon’s print-on-demand service (Createspace).
  • Originally the book was meant to be more than 700 pages, but Createspace has a limit of 480 pages, so we had to resize the fonts and space layout, cut images, interviews and articles. Everything that was not included in the book will be published on this site in the following months!
  • We know that it would be impossible to satisfy everyone, so there will be people that will complain about not enough images, not enough space between paragraphs, not enough interviews, not enough games for a console or another, typos or layout colors they don’t like. Don’t worry, if there will ever be another Unseen64 book, we’ll follow your advice, for now we are just happy to finally publish the book after all the work and efforts we put into it :)
  • Feel free to record video reviews of the book, write a sincere review on your website or on Amazon, take photos, share what you like with your friends! Just consider to support Unseen64 on Patreon or buy another copy of the book as a gift if you want to help our mission to remember lost games :)
  • Let us know if you find any print issues or other errors! Each printed book has slightly different colors and placement, each copy is unique!
  • This book was made with love and sleep deprivation.

The main objective of this book is to let our readers to support Unseen64 by buying a copy for their collection and the earnings will be used to keep working on Unseen64 and make it even better in the following months and years! Now that the book is finally published, we have many new things planned for the future of Unseen64 :)  If you have any question about the book, let us know in the comments!


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U64 Staff & Contributors




29 thoughts on “Video Games You Will Never Play: the Unseen64 Book is now available!

  1. MAIcrosoft

    I still remember the time when this was just a concept and far away from reality and now it’s finally here! Congrats everyone! :D

  2. monokoma

    Thanks to everyone for the nice comments! :D We put really too much time and efforts into this book, we’ll probably never repay all the hours we spent researching and writing, but it’s really made with love and we are happy that it’s finally published, we hope readers could enjoy all the obscure, weird and unseen stories we written about :)

  3. John Doom

    :) Nice! I’m reading the index right now and it’s amazing that you were able to learn more about videogames like “The Fallen”, “Mission Impossible”, “Sonic Saturn”, ICO”, >>”THE LAST NINJA 4″<<, "Fear Effect Inferno", … so many titles, great work! Must-buy!
    P.S.: does it talk about Resident Evil's FPS prototype too?

      1. monokoma

        For some of those articles there is no new info, but better organized details with what was known, for others we were able to receive answers from developers and add new details! :D Each of those games would need a dedicated book and many months of researches to explore as much as possible their story.. maybe one day we’ll be able to do it too! :O

  4. Zanac

    Hi. Is there any way to see a preview of some of the pages that show the games? The preview pages are text only. I want to see if it’s worth it for me to pay extra for the color version. Thanks.

        1. monokoma

          I added a gallery of photos in the post! I had to convert and resize a bit the original photos as the files were too big, but they should be good enough to see how the print looks!

  5. GoombaSquad

    Please bring the “Full Coloured” version and/or (maybe?) a HARDCOVER one to Amazon Canada!
    Thank you!

      1. monokoma

        About the Hardcover version: we used Amazon’s Print on Demand service to print the book (Createspace), at the moment they don’t have an hardcover option but we’d love to do it in the future if they could add it too! :)

  6. JokerJay779

    I can recognize some of the characters on the covers of the book like Slippy, Conker, Lucas, and Claus. But who are the others?

    1. monokoma

      There are also:

      On the color cover, from left to right: witch from True Fantasy Live Online, Sonic, Elsa from RE 1.5, Beat from Jet Set Radio Wii, Asagi from Makai Wars PSP, Lucas and Claus, the protagonist from Space Agency (the buy with white hair), the protagonist from Tengai Makyou II

      On the black/white cover, from left to right: an enemy from Raven Blade, Sabre from Dinosaur Planet, ICO, Peppy and Slippy from Starfox, the protagonist from Game Zero (the girl in red), Riqa, Conker, the protagonist from Bio Force Ape (NES) and a character from Monster Maker (Saturn)

      and there are even more on the back covers :D

      1. JokerJay779

        Ah I see. I recognized Sonic right after I made that comment and I didn’t notice Peppy’s ears until I looked more closely.

  7. Christian Mohr Jensen

    I have finally placed an order on the color version on createspace, Just for supporting you guys. You definitely deserve it, Look forward to read about good stuff when my book arrive. :-)

  8. Jaffar

    Really a great book ! 2 questions please:

    -Is that old game called “BELOW” from PRESTO STUDIO featured ?

    -How many games approx. mentioned for the original Xbox section ?

  9. Tim Legdeur

    Once I get paid I’m definitely ordering the full color version of this book. Projects like this deserve my full support and respect and I can’t wait to see what else you guys will make in the future.

    1. monokoma

      Thanks a lot for your support Tim! In the end the Full-Color book print-cost is really high, plus the Amazon percentage and the final price is quite prohibitive. We may be able to manually ship a cheaper version of it with no Amazon percentage, I’ll have to check. If you are interested, send me an email to [email protected] and i’ll see what we can do

  10. Jamie

    Hello,

    I purchased a copy of the full-color version of Video Games You Will Never Play from Amazon and because of their non-existent quality control and terrible packaging it arrived damaged (ditto the TWO rounds of replacement copies they sent before I just asked for a refund).

    So I wanted to get in contact and find out if there are any other sellers of the full-color edition other than Amazon? I absolutely love the book, but as a collector I’m really after a pristine copy and Amazon has no interest or ability to make that happen.

    So please let me know if there is anywhere else I can purchase the full-color edition of the book.

    Many thanks for any assistance,

    Jamie

    1. monokoma

      Hi Jamie! Sorry to read about the issue with Amazon shipping :( unfortunately the book is published with Amazon’s “print on demand” service, so they are the ones who directly print each book and ship them around the world. Even our own copies were printed by Amazon and shipped to us by their couriers, some copies were ok, some were a bit damaged, it’s quite random..

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