unseen64

We are happy to announce 3 eBooks taken from our “Video Games You Will Never Play” physical book are featured in the latest eBook bundle by Story Bundle! Our “PS2 & Xbox Video Games You Will Never Play”, “GameCube Video Games You Will Never Play” and “Dreamcast Video Games You Will Never Play” can be found in this bundle in their exclusive ePub and Mobi versions (our full book is available in physical form on Amazon and in PDF on Patreon), so you can easily read them in your eBook reader.

In the same bundle you can also find many interesting eBooks about less known video games and their history, such as Game Boy Works by Jeremy Parish, The Guide to Retro Indie Games by Kurt Kalata, GameDev Stories by David L. Craddock, Katamari Damacy by L. E. Hall!

Funds raised with this eBook bundle will support Unseen64, the other books authors and you can also choose to donate 10% to The Video Game History Foundation, a non-profit foundation founded by Frank Cifaldi, which primary aim is the archival, preservation, and dissemination of historical media related to video games.

Here’s the full description, for more details check https://storybundle.com/games

The weather outside may be frightful, but StoryBundle’s Spring Fired-Up Bundle offers 13 books – our biggest collection yet! – about gaming culture and development to melt your winter doldrums, available for a limited time on www.storybundle.com.

David L. Craddock delves even deeper into randomly generated dungeons in Dungeon Hacks: Expanded Edition, which provides an extensive look at the making of early roguelike RPGs as well as a new interview with Rogue’s co-creators and three extra books on games influenced by the genre. In GameDev Stories; Volume 2, Craddock curates 13 interviews from the hundreds of hours of conversations he’s had with developers of games spanning InFamous and Prototype to Diablo and Hack.

Journalist and prolific Nintendo historian Jeremy Parish maps out two years of classic Game Boy games with Game Boy Works Volume 1 and Game Boy Works Volume 2, covering beloved and more obscure titles such as Alleyway, Pipe Dream, and Boomer’s Adventure in ASMIK World.

Alongside those four DRM-free eBooks, John Harris collects write-ups of arcade games curated from his Extended Play indie mag, Boss Fight Books author Laura E. Hall rolls through the history of Katamari Damacy, journalist Wes Locher explores the community around enduring MMO classic Ultima Online, Hardcore Gaming101’s Kurt Kalata blasts a path through Contra and other shoot-em-ups, and more.

StoryBundle is a pay-what-you-want platform for independent authors to share their works with readers (and gamers) like you. Paying at least $5 will get you four books from the Spring Fired-Up Game Bundle, while paying $15 or more will get you six bonus books. – David L. Craddock

For StoryBundle, you decide what price you want to pay. For $5 (or more, if you’re feeling generous), you’ll get the basic bundle of four books in any ebook format—WORLDWIDE.

• Game Boy Works Vol. I by Jeremy Parish

• You and Your Friends Are Dead by Joel Couture

• HG101 Presents: The Guide to Retro Indie Games Vol. 1 by Kurt Kalata

• PS2 and Xbox Video Games You Will Never Play by Unseen64

If you pay at least the bonus price of just $15, you get all four of the regular books, plus NINE more!

• GameDev Stories: Volume 2 by David L. Craddock

• Dungeon Hacks: Expanded Edition by David L. Craddock

• Game Boy Works Vol. 2 by Jeremy Parish

• Memories of Arcadia by John Harris

• Boss Fight Books: Katamari Damacy by L. E. Hall

• HG101 Presents: Contra and Other Konami Classics by Kurt Kalata

• GameCube Video Games You Will Never Play by Unseen64

• Braving Britannia by Wes Locher

• Dreamcast Video Games You Will Never Play by Unseen64

This bundle is available only for a limited time via http://www.storybundle.com. It allows easy reading on computers, smartphones, and tablets as well as Kindle and other ereaders via file transfer, email, and other methods. You get multiple DRM-free formats (.epub and .mobi) for all books!

It’s also super easy to give the gift of reading with StoryBundle, thanks to our gift cards – which allow you to send someone a code that they can redeem for any future StoryBundle bundle – and timed delivery, which allows you to control exactly when your recipient will get the gift of StoryBundle.

As always thanks for your support! 

2019 is coming soon 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. We take away this extra time from our sleep, friends and family just to search info on lost games, write articles, read Unseen64 related emails, reply to messages on social networks, resolve technical issues on the site, save media and contact developers.

Here are some of the lost games we archived on Unseen64 in 2018:

• Shantae 32 bit [Playstation 1, PC – Cancelled]
• Morphs: Flashback 2 [Sega Mega CD – Cancelled]
• Metal Slader Glory 2 [Nintendo 64DD – Cancelled]
• Project Cairo (Craveyard) [Nintendo 64DD – Cancelled]
• BioSwarm (BattleSport 2) [Playstation, Nintendo 64 – Cancelled]
• Legends (Pandemic Studios) [Xbox 360 – Cancelled]
• Commando (Namco) [Playstation – Cancelled]
• Alien Reign (SquareSoft) [Playstation? – Cancelled]
• Alone in the Dark 5 [PS2, Xbox – Cancelled]
• Brooklyn Stories [Cancelled – Xbox 360, PS3, PC]
• Serengeti [Xbox, PC – Cancelled]
• Maximo: the Dark Knight [PS2 – Cancelled Pitch]
• Farnation (Sega) [Dreamcast, Xbox – Cancelled]
• Incursion (Argonaut Games) [PC – Cancelled]
• Junction Point (Looking Glass RPG) [PC – Cancelled]
• Shatterman (Angel Studios) [Hasbro Toaster VR – Cancelled]
• Thieves World (Bits Studios) [N64 – Cancelled]
• Energy (Zeus Software) [PC – Cancelled]
• SuperBot’s “Rival Schools” [PS3 – Cancelled]
• WET 2: Double Feature [Cancelled – PS3, Xbox 360]
• Go Carts (DMA Design) [Nintendo 64 – Cancelled]
• Rare’s Cancelled “Casual Monster Hunter” [Xbox 360]
• Shining Legend (Princess & Knight) [DS – Cancelled]
• X-Fighters (Midway) [Dreamcast – Cancelled]

You only see a few articles published on the site every month, but to keep it alive we invest dozens of hours of work every week. 95% of the needed work is done by monokoma and in the last few years it became harder and harder to find more people who can help the site steadily. Most contributors just write one or two articles, before vanishing forever.

While we still love remembering obscure, forgotten lost games, in 2018 it became clear to us that our work for Unseen64 is getting harder and harder, while most people are not interested in a website of this kind. It’s hard to keep the interest high, especially to support our work on Patreon:

• We still have hundreds of lost games for console and PC to write about, but most of them are obscure projects by small studios. There are no more popular projects like “Resident Evil 1.5” or “Sonic Xtreme” to uncover or it’s almost impossible to gather information about them.
• Even for those obscure and little cancelled games, it became harder to receive more details and write good articles. Some years ago we could contact 5 developers who worked on a lost game and we would get at least 2 or 3 answers. Now we contact 10 or 20 developers and 99% of the time we never get any answer. Internet has became a fearsome place, where news could deform and spread uncontrollably on social networks. Developers seem scared to talk about their old jobs, because they don’t want to get in trouble.
• Without being able to get in contact with developers, we cannot even save more screenshots or footage from many lost games we are researching. With no exclusive images or videos, we cannot even keep up with Patreon higher tier bonuses. This means people who donate to get bonuses are not happy (and we understand their disappointment).
• Without details and without good footage, we cannot create interesting video articles. The fact that monokoma is Italian and cannot record voice-over himself in english makes it even harder. In 2018 we got in contact with 4 different people who accepted to record voice-over for our videos, but in the end they never did. It’s clear it’s not possible to keep making interesting video articles when we can’t get information or even record the audio.
• From what we see, most people are not interested in supporting an old website in the age of Youtubers. With no interesting video content, people don’t support Unseen64 on Patreon and we are not shared on major websites anymore. Many years ago those same websites would write news for many of the lost games we wrote in our site in 2018. Today if you don’t make a good video about it, you are not picked up by those websites.

Is everything failing? Not yet.

Thanks to people like you who still read articles on our website and support us on Patreon we did not lose faith in our project yet.

We are still trying to keep Unseen64 alive by doing as much as we can, instead than closing it down.

• We keep remembering those obscure lost games on Unseen64, even if most people don’t care about them.
• We keep trying to get in contact with developers, and write as much as we can about a game when we don’t get any answer from who worked on it.
• If support on Patreon decreases we will search other methods to raise funds (as publishing short books using the same content we publish on the site).
• We will try to lower expenses for the site (for example by choosing a less powerful server), so that we could still keep it online even with less donations.

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.

By focusing on short text-articles about obscure lost games, do we have any chance of keeping up with the time and cost needed to keep Unseen64 online?

We are not sure.

So we have some questions for you:

• What do you think about the current state of Unseen64?
• Do you have any suggestions which could help us with our researches?
• Are you interested in small, obscure lost games forgotten by everyone else?
• If you currently support us on Patreon for higher tiers, would you still donate if we cannot secure exclusive screenshots or videos every month?
• Should we just remove Patreon tiers and let people to donate only as much as they want, without any major bonus?
• Is there something you’d like to see on Unseen64 in 2019?

In the meantime, 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.

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 have you: a community of gamers interested in preserving the unseen history of video games.

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

Alex Schaeffer, Alex Wawro, Alexandy1, allan paxton, Alpha 3, Anatoly, Anders “Captain N” Iversen, Andy S, Ben Salvidrim, Benjamin Swan, Brandon, Bransfield, Brice Onken, Cameron Banga, Christopher Cornwell, chubigans, Cody and David Studios, Coldi, Conrad A Fursa, Daniel, DidYouKnowGaming, Emiliano Rosales, Emily Bowman, Fabrizio Pedrazzini, Faisal AlKubaisi, Gabe Canada, Goffredo, Guilherme Killingsworth, Hannes, Henry Branch, Itay Brenner, Jake Baldino, James Jackson, James P Branam-Lefkove, James Steel, Jessi Williams, Joe Brookes, Joe Tangco, joef0x, Jonathan Pena, Josh Mann, Julian Lord, Kaleb Ratcliff, Lachlan Pini, Levente Tóth, Liam Robertson, Lou, Marcos Tadeu, Mark J. Lang, MARTAZIA A BROWN, Martin GP (KAISER77), Marty Thao, Matthew Gyure, Matthew Zarzyczny, Mauro Labate, Mcsahon, Nick Robinson, Niels Thomassen, Olivier Cahagne, Patrick Enriquez, Paul, Paul Stedman, Pedro, Peter Lewis, PtoPOnline, Rich Uncle Skeleton, Riptide, Robert Dyson, Rylan Taylor, Sebastian Haley, Shalyn Miyake, Shane Gill, swagDaddyMcPimp, Taylor H, That Black Guy, The Outpost Show, The Video Game History Foundation, TheFlameCrow, TheUnbeholden, Thibaut Renaux, Thomas Muste Jr, Thomas.nunn7, Tony, tydaze, Vitor Takayanagi de Oliveira and everyone else! (did we forget someone?)

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.