Frog Dude is a cancelled platformer that was in development by Twilight for Genesis / Mega Drive in 1993. The game was never officially announced but, in 2014, Gamesthatwerent contacted Andy Swann, the lead programmer of Frog Dude, which shared a short playable demo of the game.
The main character was a strange man who used a mace to attack and could transform himself into a long-tongued frog. There is nothing to interact with, no enemies to fight, and no sound effects or music. However, at least a nice cutscene welcomes players at the beginning of the prototype.
According to Gamesthatwerent, the project was shelved before it could even be touted at publishers:
Andy’s agent, John Cook, had come in and said that the Frog Dude title was “workman-like” and suggested they didn’t bother with finishing it.
Read more about this game and download the proto on Gamesthatwerent.
If you had a Nintendo 64 in the late ’90 you probably remember one of the most interesting games announced but never released for the console: Freak Boy.
Here’s a short snippet from the original press release:
IRVINE, CALIF., May 16, 1996 — Enter the world of FREAK BOY in Virgin Interactive Entertainment’s (VIE) first NINTENDO 64 (N64) game. Three-dimensional graphics, addicting play mechanics and cutting-edge technology that uses morphing special effects define the world in which FREAK BOY lives – an alien world N64 players won’t ever want to leave. Created by Burst, VIE’s in-house development team, FREAK BOY is scheduled to be in stores in early 1997.
Unfortunately the game never seen the light of day, cancelled after its publisher decided to made the team to rework the project multiple times because of marketing decisions. While many cancelled games risk to be lost forever, deleted by the same developers or forgotten in some dusty archives, we could have more luck with Freak Boy.
In september 2015 a reader of Unseen64 randomly found a working early prototype of Freak Boy at a carboot sale in Guildford, UK. It seems that the seller at this flea market did not know much about the historical importance of the strange cart that he was selling, along with other old games, probably in a dusty cardbox. Luckily our friend recognized the title written with a marker on the dev-cart and quickly bought it before other retrogamers. It seems that along with Freak Boy the same seller had 2 other prototype carts, one had written “casinò” and the second one “mario 2“. Unfortunately a the moment we don’t know what was the content of the other 2 carts (if the new owners of those protos are reading this article, please send us an email!).
The Unseen64 reader that found this Freak Boy prototype would like to remain anonymous, but if you are interested you can contact him at [email protected]
Untill now the only available video from Freak Boy was an ugly, pixellated footage from E3 1996, finally we are able to see more from the project, even if in its incomplete alpha. Take a look at the short playlist below with the all the new Freak Boy videos, we hope to be able to have some longer ones soon. Enjoy!
Witchwood is a cancelled action adventure game that was in development from 1994 to 1996 by Team 17, the studio best known for the Worms series. The game would have been published by Ocean for Amiga and PC, but in 1995 moved to PC, Playstation, Saturn, and Jaguar. As noted by Hallfiry of the Betaarchive Forum, while working on Witchwood, Team 17 was also developing Speris Legacy; another action adventure similar to the Legend of Zelda games that was released on Amiga in 1996.
The reason for the project’s termination is as of yet unknown. One possibility is that Team 17’s publishing partner, Ocean, elected to drop the game’s funding in light of Speris’ apparently lacklustre sales; rather than risk making another loss.
Despite the game’s cancellation, its soundtrack was released by Team17 composer, Bjørn Lynne, in 1996, and a playable demo of Witchwood was leaked online some years ago: you can download it from Kult Game.
We’d like to thanks all our patrons on Patreon for the awesome support, we are happy to see that people understand the importance of having an archive to remember games that we’ll never play and with your help we can continue to keep the site online and to do more to preserve lost videogames! We have recently reached the goal of 250$ a month, so now we can finally fully work on the Unseen64 book :) We are still trying to keep the cost as low as possible, but keeping the quality as high as possible. Other gaming book had to rise thousands of $ to be created, we hope to be able to publish it with much less, in about 10 months from now.
How is this possible? Well, the main Unseen64 staff is writing new and updated articles for the book in their free time and we asked to friends and readers to help us in writing more articles. As most of this is volunteer work, instead than to pay people to write articles, we’ll send them a copy of the book, which printing and shipping cost will be covered by donations. In this way, we should be able to complete all the articles for the book without spending too much and at the same time having great articles written by experts and lovers of unseen games.
We’ll also have some help from friends that already work with publishing and designing software for their main job, to organize the best format and layout for the book. For the book cover we’ll probably organize a contest in the following months, so if you are interested in creating an artwork for it, let us know! We’ll then publish the book worldwide trough Amazon, so everyone will be able to easily order a copy. Remember that people that donated 25$ a month for at least 2 months will get a copy of the book :)
The book will be focused on cancelled videogames and we’ll also try to get interviews with developers that worked on some of our favorite projects. What’s more to say? If there’s something that you’d love to see in a book dedicated to lost videogames, let us know in the comments below!
Thanks to your support we were able to rise 600$ to pay the Unseen64 server for 2016! We are super happy :) Before to start to rise donations for the 2017 server (we probably could start the next year), future donations will be set aside in a “preservation fund“, for emergency site expenses, support for the Unseen64 Book Project and other equipment that could help the archive: all costs will be approved by our patrons, before to be used! Your support is super important for us and we’ll always ask for your vote before to use donations from the Preservation Fund :)
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