Unseen News

2018 is here and as every year we’d like to review what we did the last year and make some plans for the new one :)

As most of you known, we work on Unseen64 in our own free time, after a long day of our day-jobs, taking away this extra time from our sleep, friends and family just to read Unseen64 related emails, reply to messages on social networks, resolve technical issues on the site, search info on lost games, save media, contact developers and write articles.

Even if you only see a few articles or videos published every month, to keep the site alive as it is, it takes dozens and dozens of hours of work every week. 99% of the articles are written by monokoma, who also manages tech issues, replies to emails and on social networks (mostly on Twitter). In 2017 we started to repay a few of these hours thanks to the help of all of our Patrons, to let him work a bit less on freelance jobs and to work a few more hours on Unseen64 instead.

We still did not reach our goal of $550 on Patreon, so monokoma can’t really quit any more of his freelance activities to invest more time into Unseen64. Still, these donations permits him to not lose faith in our project and to keep it alive – instead than to close the site down.

Patreon is essential for the survival of a niche project like Unseen64, a website 99% managed by a single italian guy in this age of Youtube and gaming videos in english.

We are really grateful for your kind words and your help: without our Patrons, Unseen64 would already be dead. You prompt us to keep up doing this, even during the hardest times.

What we did in 2017

We saved these forgotten lost games in our website:

• Djinn, Diablo 2’s spiritual sequel by former Blizzard North devs
• Project FUUB, THQ’s failed dice peripheral and games
• Road Trip, a zombie-apocalypse adventure game by Hydravision Entertainment (Obscure)
• Project Carbondale, SEGA’s ambitious survival horror meant to be their answer to the Resident Evil franchise
• Project Nano, Epic Games’s ambitious action adventure post- Gears of War
• (b)Last, an action game inspired by Lovecraft and the Matrix in development by Quantic Dream
• The Skate or Die reboot by Criterion Games (Burnout)
• Kyskrew, an obscure RPG for Dreamcast and PC
• Heartland, David Jaffe’s political shooter for PSP
• Elveon, a promising action adventure in the vein of Zelda and Dark Souls
• Iron Angel, an ambitious sci-fi flight / combat simulator
• A mysterious, untitled Nintendo 64 fighting game by Konami
• Citizen Siege: Wage Wars a cancelled multimedia game / project by Oddworld Inhabitants
• Project Overdrive, the Russian GTA3 in development before GTA3
• Conker: Bad Fur Day 2
• Game of Death, a survival horror in which you would kill real-life serial killers
• Deadline, a game inspired by Metal Gear Solid and Half Life 2
• The cancelled sequel to Swery65‘s weird adventure D4
• The lost point & click adventure by Rare which was the origin of Donkey Kong’s Klremlings
• and many more!

We also published these videos featuring previously unseen games:

• What happened to Fighting Force 3?
• Sleeping Giants, Warren Spector’s cancelled RPG
• Jade Empire 2 and Revolver: Bioware’s lost RPGs
• Deus Ex 3: Insurrection by Ion Storm
• Obscure: Dark Aura, the cancelled survival horror for Nintendo DS
• Pilotwings‘ Lost Open World Reboot (thanks to Liam!)
• The Lost Disney Game Pitch: Project Goliath (thanks to Liam!)
• and many more!

These are just a few example of the whole unseen history of video games we could lose if not researched and unveiled.

When everyone already know about such lost games as Zelda URA, Resident Evil 1.5, Bio Force Ape or Sonic X-Treme, there’s not much left to discover: only less popular / important lost games (that still deserve to be remembered) or previously unknown and intriguing projects that can only be covered by luck or months of time-consuming researches.

To continue our work, we entrust you and all of our Patrons, people who know why it’s important to keep a site like Unseen64 alive.

Unseen64 plans in 2018

In 2018, we’ll continue doing our best to remember lost games no one else cares to write about:

1. Continue covering lost games on Unseen64, even the less impressive ones: every single cancelled game deserve to not be forgotten, because each one could have been a favorite game for someone. Some of these less-impressive unseen games still have an historical importance, an interesting connection with developers who later created a different masterpiece. Even if some of these canned projects could have been bad games if only released, we still care to remember them for curiosity and historical preservation.
2. Expanding old articles for some of the more interesting unseen games that are not already covered somewhere else: even when an unseen game is widely known, there could still be many details that are missing about its development, plot, gameplay mechanics and other random memories about its conception. We’d like to dedicate some time to deeply research more info about some of our favorite games we’ll never play, those lost games that also have a wide appeal and could be interesting for all kind of readers.
3. Continue making new video articles: we know that today most people don’t read gaming reviews on websites anymore and just rely on video reviews from Youtube. For “historical” websites like Unseen64 is just the same: there are many more people that would watch a 10 minutes video about a cancelled game, rather than to fully read a 1.000 words article on the same topic, as proven by the Unseen64 video series created by Liam and hosted on Did You Know Gaming. Just like in the past gaming magazines have been replaced by gaming websites, now youtubers are taking the mass-market lead for videogames reviews, news and historical researches. While it requires more time to create video articles by monokoma (with the help of some english friends for voice-over), this kind of coverage would reach many more users than 3 or 4 written articles and it would help to keep patrons to donate for Unseen64. As we have seen, people are more incline to donate for video content than for website articles.
4. Continue publishing the cheap-edition of our book: in September 2017 we also started to release a new low-price edition of the Unseen64 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). We are currently working on the next volume for 32 bit and 64 bit games! We will also release a kindle version in the future (ad the moment you can already get a PDF version of the book by pledging 5 $ on Patreon). By keep selling our book, we can raise even more funds to keep working more and more on Unseen64.

All of these activities will require time, efforts and collaboration between all the people who help the Unseen64 collective, but we really want to keep Unseen64 alive for as much as possible.

As always big gaming networks such as IGN or Kotaku have the resources to own powerful servers and to pay a team to work full-time on their websites, keeping them online and publishing daily updates.

We don’t have their resources, but we think we have something better: we have you, a community of gamers who know why it’s important to remember beta and cancelled games.

There are many ways to help Unseen64 and thanks to all the other websites, gamers and youtubers who also use their time to remember beta, unreleased and unused gaming documents, together we can save as many unseen games as possible.

Remember: Unseen64 is still online thanks to the awesome people who pledge on Patreon: together, we can do it!

We’d like to thank all of you (in order of donations) who are helping U64 on Patreon:

Daan Koopman, Sentinator of Team Haruhi, joef0x, Mark J. Lang, Thomas Whitehead, David Galindo, Patrick Enriquez, Riptide, Patrick Kupilas, Александр Шутенков, Alex Schaeffer, Renee Violette, Mcsahon, Chris Chapman, Marty Thao, Ryan Razon, Taylor H, Itay Brenner, Pierre-Luc Pineault, Tiago Pereira dos Santos silva, Emiliano Rosales, Faisal AlKubaisi, Julian Lord, Shane Gill, Kaleb Ratcliff, Vitor Takayanagi de Oliveira, Joe Tangco, Peter Lewis, TheUnbeholden, Matt T, Thomas Muste Jr, Hannes, MARTAZIA A BROWN, Pedro, Gabriel Girouard, Jonah Bealy, Sebastian Haley, Knight, Mason “SoberDwarf” M., Arkadij, Ben Salvidrim, Keith Stack, Benjamin Swan, The Video Game History Foundation, Daryl Baxter, Nick Fancher, allan paxton, Robert Dyson, tydaze, Justin Moor, Liam Robertson, Kristian Binder, Gabe Canada, Tim Lawrence, Thomas.nunn7, That Black Guy, Mauro Labate, Olivier Cahagne, Alex MacIntyre, Henry Branch, Matthew, Anders “Captain N” Iversen, Coldi, Joe Brookes, James Jackson, Aaron Sharratt, Jonathan Pena, Jonathan Cooper, Paul Stedman, Jrg McJrg, Brice Onken, Alex Stutzman, Guilherme Killingsworth, Pablo Bueno Navarro, Paul, Josh Mann, Dan Thomas, Adrian, Ben Cowling, Alex Wawro, Niels Thomassen, Lou, Matthew Gyure, PtoPOnline, Jesus Tovar, Jacob, Brandon, Lisa, Martin GP (KAISER77), Aaron, James Steel, Tony, Bransfield, Christopher Cornwell, Anatoly, Goffredo and everyone else! (did we forget someone?)

We <3 you

In about 20 days Christmas will be upon us, if you still don’t know what to gift to your nerd friend, maybe these could help you and the Unseen64 archive! We have a book about cancelled videogames and random t-shirts & merch: by buying these you support the archive and help us to keep the site online (and in return you get a gift for someone you love, or hate).

Here you can download the table of content for our book, check our Unseen64 book page to know where you can find it!

T-shirts with the Unseen64 logo 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 :)

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