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Unseen64 T-Shirts (& More) Available on Amazon & Redbubble to Help Keep the Archive Alive!

We never thought that one day we could sell official Unseen64 t-shirts, but as one of our friends suggested this idea to gather some more funds to keep the site alive… why not? So now you can wear a new T-Shirt with the Unseen64 logo or with one of our custom-made pixel-art characters inspired by our favorite lost games!

All of these are available in different colors and sizes on Amazon.com (Shipping to USA only)

For international shipping you can order these items from Redbubble, they have more options (wall art! mugs! stickers!), but price for T-shirts is more expensive (but at least you can order them even if you don’t live in USA):

All the earnings gathered by selling these will be added to the fund we use to keep the site online (pay the server, technical support, emergency expenses, etc.) and alive (work a bit less on freelancing jobs and a bit more on researches and updates for Unseen64).

If you buy one of these, let us know what you think and send us a photo when you’ll get it :)

What do you think? Please let us know your feedback below!

As always, thanks a lot for your support in these 16+ years of unseen gaming on Unseen64

Best Video Games Books: Our Top 100+ List!

best video games books list

To celebrate the release of our book “Video Games You Will Never Play” (published in September 2016), we would like to suggest to you even more amazing video game books you can read while trapped at home during the upcoming cold winter or to buy as a Christmas present for your nerd cousin who loves video games. There are already many “top 10 books” lists with some nice suggestions (such as the ones at Goodreads, Wikipedia, Games Radar, Heavy, PC Gamer and The New Yorker), but those usually don’t have less known titles we love and often they list the same books over and over. We’d like to suggest many more books related to games, with the help of our readers, like you!

This long list with all our favorite games-related books (available in English) was originally meant to be added as a bonus in our own volume, but as we had to cut a lot of content to fit our articles in the 480 pages limit, this “best video game books” list had to be canned too. In the end we decided to still finish this huge article and to publish it on our website, so here it is!

We also asked to some of our favorite authors and gaming historians (such as Bob Pape, Brian Schrank, Chris Kohler, Clyde Mandelin, Felipe Pepe, Gabe Durham, Jeremy Parish, Jesper Juul, John Szczepaniak, Nathan Altice, Nick Montfort, Rob Strangman and Sorrel Tilley) to suggest a book themselves and in the end, we collected more than 100 titles. We would like to add even more videogames books, to create the most complete list ever to help people to find the most interesting ones. Each book is listed with details, price, number of pages, size and average price on Amazon, so you can easily compare them (remember: always check the current price on Amazon, as they often change day by day and could be on sale!).

If you know of other great video game books that should be added, please leave a message below with a short description to explain why you loved that book, so we can include it in our list! Thanks a lot for your help :)

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The unseen games of next-gen? Not on U64

Unseen 64 was born in 2001, from the passion of some italian friends that after some years looking at Nintendo 64 games that never came out or that were released with many differences from the beta version, decided to make an archive about them. We were young and with a lot of free time, it was just for fun that we kept working on U64 until it became the huge archive that you see today.Sadly we are not young anymore: we have families, full-time jobs, bills to pay and other real-life commitments that keep us busy 24/7. We don’t have so much free time anymore to write about unseen games. If we find some free time for our lovely videogames, we prefer to play them, than to write about the ones that we’ll never be able to play! From a couple of years we have already slowed-down the updates for Unseen 64 and there are still hundreds, HUNDREDS of emails, comments, contributions that we were not able to read yet. Also, to keep online our archive there are lots of other technical-related works to do, bugs to fix, servers to keep safe, plugins to update.

The current situation of videogames is much more complex than what we tried to follow in the early 2000: there are games for consoles, there are games for handhelds, there are games for PCs, there are games for smarthphones and there are hundreds of new indie-games announced every day. It’s basically impossible to keep up with so many interesting videogames that could be cancelled or that could be released with many changes from their beta versions.

This is why we decided that Unseen 64 will not cover new games for next-gen consoles (PS4, XBONE, Wii U) and not even “current gen” handleds as the 3DS or PSVita. We would not be able to do a good work when we are already in trouble to cover all the most interesting beta and cancelled games for the “retro” consoles. So Unseen 64 will slowly became a “more static” archive of Retro-Unseen-Games.

Today is much more easy to create a “website” using something like wikis, wordpress, tumblr, blogger and similar free tools so we hope that there will be some young gamers with more free time than us, that will decide to create their “Unseen Next-Gen Games Archive” for all the future beta and cancelled games.

U64 will not be closed. We’ll still keep Unseen 64 updated as much as we can and we’ll try to ready all the contributions that you will send to us, but we don’t know when we’ll be able to reply and to add them. For quick news about beta and cancelled games, we’ll probably share them on Twitter or Facebook, so follow us!

Let us know what you think about this and thanks a lot for you support in all these years! :D

 
Welcome to Unseen64 v4.0! :D

Welcome to Unseen64 v4.0! :D

Finally! Finally, finally finally finally! XD Finally after a year or 4 (I think?) I found the time and will to upgrade the site LOL! There is still a lot that has to happen but I have everything ready so it can be used! :D Most of the things I still need to do are especially background stuffs though so yeah you won’t be seeing much of those :3

As you can see the layout is updated to fit today’s techs :D The new and fresh layout is also ‘responsive’ meaning you can view the site on any device! The site will adapt itself to the device you are viewing it on. Ranging from phones, 3ds, vitas, tablets, tv’s and what not! You should try it yourself, it’s a llot of fun! :D

We also have a new Forum now! Finally we can discus our favorite unseen and released/upcoming games again! :D Also the “Off [Beta] Topic and Spam” section is back for some fun :) The forum works as it should completely but me and mono still have to add some stickies to it. Expect them to come soon! There are just two things you need to know, and that is that there is no possibility to PM stuff and you cannot preview posts but you can still edit them though. This due to some technical limitations.

Your profile is also different now. Instead of having to go to a special login page you can now directly login on the main site! Next to the traditional way of registering for U64 you can now also login with your favorite social network! Just click one of the icons under the login form to login with one of those and BAM! you can comment and participate in the forum! :D If you are logged in you can click on your name in the YOUR ACCOUNT block to edit your profile and upload your custom avatar and edit your signature and all. You also only need one account from now on for everything! No more different accounts for the site and forums and etc.

A last thing is that we also want to interact more on social networks! As you can see there are buttons to share posts and articles you like instantly on you Facebook, Twitter or G+. If you follow us on either Facebook or Twitter we will also auto-post an announcement with a link of every new article from now on so you will always be updated!

That’s it for now. If you have something to say about the new Unseen64, please leave your message in the comment box below (which also supports threaded comments from now on LOL)! I hope you will enjoy the new Unseen64 V4! :D 

Croc 3: Stone of the Gobbos [Cancelled (Rumor) – PSX / PS2 / XBOX / GameCube]

Update: OldClassicGamer sent us some info to prove that these info about Croc 3 are fake, so we’ll just leave this page as a “rumor” to let people to still find the original story and the updated info. Here is what OldClassicGamer wrote:

 I don’t know who sent you that info but whoever did it was not from Argonoaut and was probably someone with too much free time since he came with all those details.

Where is my proof? Well, first of all, here is website: www.storybox.club
This is new game from creators of Croc and they are asking for donations. They promised they will include Croc characters in-game if they get enough donated money. Here are more details you can read first post and find out everything.

Story Box developers do not own the IP, but they are currently contacting Jez to see if they can get permission to use Croc characters in their game called Story Box. Jez San is founder of Argonaut. Here, you can read all the info about Jez: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3965937.stm

And two final evidences I have are conversations with Story Box developers and Zenimax. I will attach screenshots in email as a proof. So if Zenimax confirmed themselves that they never owned Croc, then the whole story and Croc 3 playable build that cannot be leaked because Zenimax is not allowing it is fake. I would like to ask you nicely to take down that article because it is spreading lies and it can damage potentially new Croc games that will come after Story Box is successful.

Also, if game was started being developed in 2001, then how come no info was known even in 2004 befor Argonaut bankrupt. The truth is, Croc 3 was going to happen but they only started talking about it in 2004, before they went bankrupt. Prototype for game was never created since game was never in developement.

What do you think about this? Leave your comment below!

Original post:

The original Croc is a platform game published by Fox Interactive and developed by Argonaut Software (AKA Argonaut Games) in 1997 for the PlayStation and Sega Saturn. A sequel, Croc 2, was released in 1999 but the third chapter of the series was never released, even if development was started. The game was called Croc 3: Stone of the Gobbos (also known as Croc 3: Barons Revenge and Croc 3: Croc Returns! during development). It was to launch on Playstation 2, Gamecube and Xbox in 2005. The game would of been a direct sequel to the events of Croc 2, and would feature 2 player on all 3 platforms. In this game, Croc was to yet again, be faced with stopping Baron Dante and saving the Gobbos. However this time Dante has a spell that is not able to be stopped unless Croc finds the Sacred “Stone of the Gobbos”.

Sadly after Argonaut Software closed in 2004, the IP for Croc was sold to Zenimax Media Inc, and Zenimax Media had Mud Duck Productions continue development of Croc 3: Stone Of The Gobbos. However, the game was cancelled after trouble with the developer and thus, ended the Croc Franchise.

The world shown in the render below is the Croc 3 castle hub. In Croc 3, rather than the former games, Argonaut Software were using Full Explorable Hub Worlds sorta like Spyro The Dragon. This way it was more easy for younger kids to play the game. Some of the Croc 3 inspiration was coming from Spyro Year Of The Dragon (One of the biggest being hub worlds with portals).

croc 3 cancelled

Croc 3 started development in the summer of 2001. Argonaut Software had split into three teams to work on their big games, Malice (Which started development in the 90`s but later bumped dev up to PS2), other small projects (like Carve), and Croc 3. Croc 3 was having trouble finding a publisher. They had contacted Fox, and they wanted no part of Croc 3 due to the sales of Croc 2. Argonaut then contacted EA and they said they would publish it, but their fees were too high. The Publisher they stuck with was Activision, who said they would publish it and help Argonaut work around their budget. With a team of only 10 people working on the project, Croc 3 went through many changes.

First it was in development for Dreamcast, Playstation, Playstation 2, Xbox, Gamecube and PC, however with the failing sales of Dreamcast (And due to Croc 2 never appearing on sega), Argonaut stopped working on the Dreamcast version and focused more on the PS,PS2,XB and GC versions. They later cancelled the PC version as well.

The next problem Argonaut ran into was the voice actor for croc had no wish to return to the role. So they would need to recast. The engine they were developing on was an unstable version of their in house engine, BRender, which also powered Malice and a couple of other Argonaut games. This version was a new updated one exclusive to Croc 3 to allow for certain things to try to push the 4 consoles to their limits.

What started to take more time was the Playstation 1 version. This was due to the fact that Argonaut were using croc 1/2 version of BRender because BRender for Croc 3 was not compatible on Playstation 1 due to the “Next Gen” graphics. The new console versions would feature top of the line graphics developed in house to push them to their limits, while the PS1 version was simply the same graphics as croc 2. The reason Argonaut were insisting to release Croc 3 on PS1 was to keep the trilogy in line with each other on Playstation. The series was always planned as a trilogy and the third was supposed to be the final one.

Croc 3 on PS2, GC and Xbox would of been 2 player. Player 1 was Croc, and player 2 was a new crocodile named Ginger, who was a love interest to croc. (Kinda like a Amy/Sonic relationship). To appease players who hated multiplayer, Ginger would only appear in the story IF you were in 2 player. If not, she would disappear. As for the soundtrack, Justin Scharvona from croc 1, who composed the C1 soundtrack would make a return to compose it in this game.
Thanks to former Argonaut Employees from the Croc 3 Team for the contribution!