New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

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

Gunvalkyrie [DC – Cancelled]

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Gunvalkyrie was released for the XBOX, but it was originally developed for the Sega Dreamcast. It’s visual style was very similar to the final Xbox version; though the characters were rendered using a cel-shaded style reminiscent to Jet Set Radio, a popular Dreamcast game also made by the development studio, SmileBit. The Dreamcast version’s distinguishing feature was that during the game’s development, Gunvalkyrie utilized a unique control scheme using both a light gun and a controller. This control-scheme was dropped when development shifted to the Xbox version. – [info from wikipedia]

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Agartha [Dreamcast – Cancelled]

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Agartha is a cancelled horror adventure that was planned by the French software house No Cliche (author of titles like Toy Commander) for the Sega Dreamcast. Development began in 2000 and the game promised to have an interesting plot and gameplay:

During the winter of 1929 in a Romanian village that was partially destroyed by a landslide that occurred during a mysterious earthquake, a subterranean city exists called Agartha. This is where evil is being kept prisoner and is desperate to escape. Kirk the human hero will encounter a series of characters from villages, the living dead, fanatics from an evil sect, monsters, demons, solider monks, priests, archangels and the Sentinel who is the ultimate personification of evil. As Kirk you can decide to save as many innocent people as possible or to trigger the arrival of chaos on earth. As Kirk’s morals waver between good and evil, this ambiguity changes the aims of the adventure and the narration of the story.

Agartha’s gameplay was probably going to be similar to Alone in the Dark, D2 and Silent Hill, players had to explore the snowed mountains and villages, resolving puzzles and fighting against monsters / demons that lived in there. The game progress was influenced by the players’ choices, which could have decided whether to help innocent people and seal the evil town, or let them to die and help demons to destroy our planet. An online mode of some sort could have been planned too.

No Cliche’s horror adventure could have been an awesome addition to the Dreamcast’s library, however in 2001, Sega went out of the console business. Sadly No Cliche had to cancel Agartha, close down and laid off most of its staff.

Thanks to Hey Hey for the contribution!

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