Dreamcast

Shenmue / Project Berkley [DC – Beta / Tech Demo]

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Yu Suzuki has stated on several occasions that during its early stages, Shenmue was a traditional style RPG based on the characters and storyline of the hugely successful fighting game title Virtua Fighter. The Ryo character was simply Virtua Fighter character Akira to begin with. The final Ryo character has several key differences, but there is a very clear visual resemblance between him and Akira. As the game’s development progressed, the characters became original and the storyline moved away from its Virtua Fighter roots.

As the gaming industry became more aware of Sega’s next generation console towards the end of 1997 and beginning of 1998, Shenmue was also getting noticed. At this time, however, the game was only ever known as Project Berkley. Tech demos from the game were being used by Sega to show what the Dreamcast was capable of producing. Many of these sequences were very well developed, and some were even used in the final retail version of the game. This has led many to believe that Shenmue was probably one of the very first Dreamcast titles to begin production. Shenmue quickly became Sega’s flagship Dreamcast title – representing the systems powerful graphics capabilities and also its ability to render immersive, cinematic characters and settings. – [info from Wikipedia]

Thanks to KEK8 for the contribution!

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Geist Force [DC – Cancelled]

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Si conosce molto poco su Geist Force, se non che doveva essere uno sparatutto per il Sega Dreamcast, ambientato nel futuro. In un lontano pianeta, durante una guerra civile, era stata scoperta un’ arma che stava distruggendo l’astro, il vostro compito era di fermarla. Il gioco venne ufficialmente cancellato a causa del producer, non contento dello sviluppo della sua creazione, e dal fatto che il team di sviluppo era costantemente cambiato, per colpa dei designer che abbandonavano il lavoro al gioco.

Thanks to Celine for the contribution!

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Some images from www.segagagadomain.com

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Sonic Adventure [Beta / Unused Content]

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Sonic Adventure was developed by Sonic Team and released in 1998 in Japan by Sega for the Dreamcast and is the first game in the Sonic Adventure series. One of its development titles was Sonic RPG, (although the final game was an adventure game, not a standard RPG).

Originally, Sonic was supposed to be able to engage his Super Sonic form at any time during gameplay, once he had gained all seven chaos emeralds during story mode. The proof of this comes in the form of an unused voice clip in the game, in which Tikal teaches the player how to become Super Sonic. The character reveals that Sonic must gain 50 rings before he can transform and warns the player to monitor their ring consumption closely, otherwise Sonic will lose a life when he runs out.

By hacking the 2004 US PC version version of Sonic Adventure DX, it is possible to access a number of unused assets from the Tokyo Game Show 2003 build of the game. One of the most notable of these is an early version of the character selection screen. The omitted menu section is fully functional if modded correctly and is labelled with the text, ‘Choose your buddy!’. Interestingly, this title is also the name of the background music composed by Jun Senoue for the finished character screen on Sonic Adventure’s official soundtrack, ‘Sonic Adventure Digi-LOG Conversation Original Sound Track’.

Sonic Adventure beta character select

A two-headed mecha dragon boss was removed from the game before the final version, but it can still be found in the prototype / beta of Sonic Adventure DX that was leaked online. It was a part of the Sky Chase level, during Sonic and Tails’ approach to the Egg Carrier in Tails’ story section. It pursues the player up until the Egg Carrier fires its laser beam at the Tornado. You can find more info on Sonic Cult!

In addition, an unused animation for Tails has been unearthed in Sonic Adventure DX via modding. By replacing Knuckles with Tails in his story mode, players can activate a glitch in Casinopolis to trigger said animation. It is noticeably very similar to Tails’ swimming animation from Sonic The Hedgehog 3; suggesting there could have at one stage been bodies of water to swim in during one of his stages, or possibly even an entirely new water-themed level, a la Hydrocity Zone.

Thanks to FullMetalMC & BowserEnemy for some of these images!

SEGA Confidential images from SEGAKatana.com

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Sonic Adventure 2 [Beta – Dreamcast]

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Sonic Adventure 2 was unveiled in June of 2000, at E3. During this time, Sonic Adventure 2 was headed in a completely different direction. There would be three playable characters; Sonic, Knuckles, and Eggman. At the time, Shadow was just a cutscene character. How the game went at first was that what you do in the game differs what happens later. This was eventually incarnated into “Shadow the Hedgehog” for the Gamecube. When the trailer for the game was revealed, fans were outraged, for the fact that there were missing characters (e.g. Tails)

Before he had his SOAP shoes in Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic had his sneakers from the 2D games. The SOAP shoes enabled Sonic to grind on rails. Also Shadow’s original name was “Terios”, which means, “reflection of”, and Rouge’s original name was “Nails”. Shadow was also referred to as “Dark Sonic” in a preview showing off some concept art of Sonic Adventure 2.

Some unused videos were found hidden in the game’s code by Mariosegafreak

Thanks to FullMetalMC, CrashAndSonicChao, and Shade3c for the contributions!

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Castlevania Resurrection [Dreamcast – Cancelled]

Castlevania: Resurrection, cancelled in March of 2000, was intended to be the seventeenth title in the Castlevania series for the short lived Sega Dreamcast console. This would also be the third Castlevania game, at the time, to enter the 3D realm. The game was to focus on Sonia Belmont and Victor Belmont, an 1800s vampire killer who had abandoned his lineage, in 1666, directly before Simon Belmont’s mission in the original Castlevania.

Greg Orduyan, the art director for the game, is so far the only staff member on the project to speak of how it would have worked out. Its cancellation is credited to many things, including disagreements between the Japanese and American Konami teams, and the death of the Dreamcast. It is rumored that Castlevania: Curse of Darkness uses some environments that were originally in this game. A beta copy was offered for sale for 3,000 Euros sometime around 2003 but then disappeared.

Thanks to DreamMare we have some more details about this lost project:

According to Jason Lee Elliott (environment artist of the game) the team of CV: Resurrection was the same of Bottom of the Ninth 99:

“Castlevania Resurrection was a game doomed from the start. When Konami first moved to San Francisco, this was one of the first projects started at the studio. I spent most of a year working on Bottom of the 9th 99 and this game was still in the early stages of pre-production. When I switched over to work on Spawn, the studio let go most of the team working on Castlevania and replaced it with the Bot9 team. A year later when I wrapped up Spawn and had taken a month long vacation I was brought onto the team and there had been much more advancement.

The team itself had a lot of troubles when I came on board. Most of the team had only ever worked on sports games so they had no idea how to make a 3D action platformer. The art team wasn’t very cohesive and couldn’t agree on a direction. The game had been in development for almost two years and had little to show. Personally, I discovered that my 3d skills had stagnated from lack of use and I was struggling to hit the quality the others were achieving. I had been at the office almost everyday for almost 3 years at this point and was suffering from severe burn out which didn’t help.

After only a few months on this team I decided I had to quit. I wasn’t having fun making games and I missed Canada. In my resignation letter I stated I would never work in games again. Just goes to show that young people in their 20’s really don’t know anything. A few months after leaving, the game was cancelled and entire studio was closed down.”

The Art Director as we know is Greg Orduyan. The Director of the game was Norio Takemoto. The CGI Director was Jenny Ryu (AKA Jenny Chang): thanks to fans of the time they discovered her digital portfolio and they put it on WayBackMachine:

“This is the Konami game project that was my introduction into the game industry. I met many talented artists there. We worked very hard and did great work to make the game. However, Dreamcast was going out of business. So finally this wonderful game got canceled. It was so sad but I know that these things happen in this industry”

It seems Jenny had to make a CGI model for Resurrection’s protagonist twice: one for the “Green Sonia” and another for “White Sonia”.

The Most well-known person on the team is probably Mark Lindsey, who created music for the game. According to Greg Orduyan of Castlevania Dungeon some presumed Castlevania Resurrection songs leaked online were just on the same CD but were not really meant for the game.

Also Capt. Gravestone put to together a great “Collector’s Guide” for Castlevania Resurrection with information, previews, details on the story, you can download it in PDF from here (5 MB).

Thanks to Celine for some of these screens! And Ryo Suzuki for the magazine scan.

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Castlevania Resurrection: Intro