Unseen News

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)

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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! 

Unseen64 summer break to complete our book!

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It’s super hot here in Italy, our PCs are melting down while we are working 9+ hours a day to complete the Unseen64 book, but we really want to finish everything in time to publish it in September! Will we able to finish it in time? Fingers crossed :) There’s still a lot to do, so to rise our chances to reach our objective we will pause new site updates for a few weeks, and we’ll be back with new articles when work on the book will be done!

We are really excited to finally publish this huge volume, it’s even bigger than what we planned, with more than 700 pages full of lost games we had to resize the font and margins with smaller ones to be able to fit as much as possible in the 480-pages limit to publish it through Amazon’s print on demand service. What will you find in Unseen64’s first book? Among updated versions of many articles already published on Unseen64 during our 15-years of existence, there will be new interesting researches, interviews, screenshots and exclusive details: we don’t want to spoil the surprises or to hype our project too much, so you’ll find out when the book will finally be available :)

We put a lot of time and efforts into this book, probably it will not sell much (how many people are interested in games they will never play?) but if you want to support us buying the book will be a great way to do it, as all revenues will be used to keep the site online and to improve our archive in the following months.. we have some nice plans for Unseen64 in 2017. While you wait for the site to be back in full, here’s a few things you can do:

Look and read: Check our archive with more than 3.000 beta and cancelled games.

Contribute: Would you like to help the U64 Archive? Read how you can help us to preserve more screens, videos and info!

Interact: Join the U64 FB Forum to discuss about unseen games with other geeks!

Donate: if you want to support our daily work to archive unseen games, please consider to donate 1$+ on Patreon, to help us to keep the site online and to improve it even more! As we wrote before, there will be some changes in our Patreon goals as soon as the book will be released, following what our current patrons want more of :)

Thanks to everyone that supports Unseen64 with love. See you all very soon!

The Unseen64 Staff – 

Contest: design the front cover for the Unseen64 book!

Contest: design the front cover for the Unseen64 book!

After 1 year and half of collective volunteer work during our (not much) spare time, sleepless nights researching, contacting developers and writing about lost games, 40+ authors that contributed with articles… our book is almost complete! Articles, related content and interviews are about 95% ready, all our (last) energies and efforts are focused to be able to publish the book this summer or early autumn. When the content will be 100% complete, we’ll have to insert these 300+ pages into the book layout, adding screenshots, photos, concept arts.. it will still take a while, but as this year is the 15° anniversary of Unseen64, the book will be the best way to celebrate together :)

Now it’s time to find a great front cover for the book… but we suck at drawing, so we’d like to ask to all our readers for help: are you an artist or do you just love to draw random stuff with Paint? Would you like to feature your artwork on the front cover of a book about cancelled games? Send us your artworks!

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The plan is to publish 2 versions of the book, one in full color and a cheaper one in black / white interior, so there will be 2 different covers, one for each version. We’d like to reward the authors of the winning covers with a copy of the book: the author of the cover chosen for the the full-color book will receive this version, while the author of the cover for the black / white book will receive the b/w version. Both covers will still be in full color but we will not rule out the possibility to use a black / white cover if there will be a great one.

Naturally as it will be a book about unseen games, we cannot left out all the unused covers: ALL PROPOSED COVERS will still be published in a “lost covers gallery” at the end of the book, with each author’s details, as their name, email and link to their online portfolio, so that readers will be able to admire everyone’s effort and talent.

Cover ideas:

There’s not a specific brief for the cover artwork, so feel free to drawn your own ideas. What would you put on the front cover of a book titled “Videogames you will never play”? There could be a group of characters from some of these lost games (here are some examples) drawn in your own style, a symbolic image with people that cannot play unreleased games or awesome pixel art to show games forgotten in a dusty warehouse, X-Files style. Whatever your imagination can cook up!

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Contest and file details:

 

Saints Row: Undercover – watch the live streaming in a few hours!

Update: you can now download the playable prototype of Saints Row: Undercover

Some days ago we wrote about Saints Row: Undercover, the cancelled PSP game revealed by Volition during one of their weekly Twitch Streams. Today you will be able to see even more from the game thanks to a dedicated stream (watch it live at 2pm pacific time), in which they will play the Saints Row: Undercover prototype, share their memories on the project, explain how they were able to save it from being lost and answer to all your questions.

The Stream is Over!

If you missed it, you can rewarch the full episode on Volition Twitch Archive

Join us on the Volition Stream at 2pm pacific time, to watch live the prototype being played and to learn more interesting details about its development! As we wrote before, please show Volition your support during the stream (ask questions in the Twitch chat, share the stream on your social accounts, etc.), as if they will get enough good feedback then in the future they could show even more lost games that are still hidden away in their archives! 

Saints Row: Undercover [PSP – Cancelled]

Saints Row: Undercover (also known as Saints Row: The Fall in its early phase) is a cancelled chapter in the popular over-the-top open world series by Volition, planned to be released for Sony’s PSP. This game was meant to be the first entry of Saints Row for portable consoles and while a 3DS version was also announced many years ago (titled Saints Row: Drive-By), neither of them were ever released.

Development on Undercover was originally started by Mass Media Games (that already worked with Volition on the PS3 version of Saints Row 2) and then transferred to Savage Entertainment (the same team that ported Star Wars: Battlefront II and Medal of Honor: Vanguard to the PSP). Initially Volition wanted to simply port Saints Row 2 to the PSP, but after a while the project became a new, original sequel, with its own story and characters.

Saints Row: The Fall  was to be set between Saints Row 1 and 2, but thanks to the success of SR2 they later decided to create a sequel to the second game, to expand its story and making it more interesting for the fans. In Saints Row PSP the city would have been split as a result of a civil war within the Saints. The Third Street Saints, who the player would have joined, possessed only a little area in the middle. We would have took the role of an undercover cop, charged with investigating the civil war within the Saints, and at the end of the game we could have decided to join them and betray the police.

The plan for Undercover was to create something similar to the GTA games for the PSP, keeping the core gameplay of the series, with crazy gameplay, a fun world to explore, character customization and coop multiplayer. The game would have had 20 main story missions to complete, along with the usual SR side activities to earn respect points.

Savage Entertainment developed a short playable prototype, but unfortunately after multiple reviews Volition decided that Undercover just wasn’t meeting the standards of what they thought a Saints Row game should be. The game was cancelled and the PSP dev kit on which the project was created was hidden away in one of Volition’s storage rooms.

Only many years later Saints Row: Undercover was found again thanks to Josh Stinson (Associate Video Editor at Volition), that stumbled upon that PSP dev kit while looking around their office. After talking about it with colleagues and with the support of Alexander Mejia (Video Producer at Volition) and Mike Watson (Community Manager at Volition), they were able to convince their bosses that such a lost games should have been shared with the fans, as an interesting curiosity and a piece of gaming history to preserve. During Volition’s stream on Twitch on the 22January 2016 they officially shown Saints Row: Undercover to the world and this Thursday (Jan 28) they will do a dedicated stream around 4pm CST.

Please join their stream on Twitch the 28th of January to see more from this lost game and to ask every questions you have directly to Volition! This is really important as if this stream will be successful Volition will release even more info on other cancelled games!

Below you can download Saints Row: Undercover walk through, design doc and fully playable prototype, also shared by the lovely people at Volition. Huge props to them!

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