unseen64

8 Bit & 16 Bit Games You Will Never Play | Low-Price Edition Book | Vol. 1

One year ago we released our huge book about cancelled video games, it had so many pages that the price was quite high because of the physical cost of printing. Finally we had some time to work on a new low-price edition of the book, divided into different short volumes, so you can just choose your favorite consoles. The content of this edition is the same of the original book (we just fixed some errors), but divided into short books.

The first volume is available right now, dedicated to cancelled 8 bit and 16 bit games (NES, Master System, Game Boy, Turbografx 16, Super Nintendo and Sega Mega Drive). 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!
+ Createspace

This will be another way to raise funds to keep Unseen64 online. As always thanks for your support! 

Unseen64 T-Shirts (& More) Available on Amazon & Redbubble to Help Keep the Archive Alive!

We never thought that one day we could sell official Unseen64 t-shirts, but as one of our friends suggested this idea to gather some more funds to keep the site alive… why not? So now you can wear a new T-Shirt with the Unseen64 logo or with one of our custom-made pixel-art characters inspired by our favorite lost games!

All of these 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 :)

What do you think? Please let us know your feedback below!

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

Unseen64 Survived for Another Year: Thank You for Your Help! What to Do in 2017?

The last couple of years were really hard for Unseen64: we had to keep updating our site to add more unseen games, while at the same time working on our book dedicated to games we will never play, that was finally published in September 2016. 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.

It could be difficult to understand when you only see a few articles or videos published every month, but to keep the site alive as it is, it takes dozens and dozens of hours of work every week. To also working on a book along with the site, it meant to take even more hours away from our daily lives, and the last few months before the book was published were really crazy.

video games you will never play book

Unseen64 is not our main job and sometimes all the effort and time needed to keep it alive is really overwhelming, but we always do the best we can. One of the reasons why we keep doing this, is the support of our awesome readers: your kind words and your donations on Patreon mean a lot for us, and you prompt us to keep up doing this, even during the hardest times.

Thanks to your support we were able to remain an independent website, to rise enough donations from Patreon to fully pay the Unseen64 server, to do multiple backups of files so we don’t lose screens, info or video, and to create a Preservation Fund to be able to save enough money for future needs.

Having more than 3.000 unseen games in our online archive and by covering games till the 7th generation of consoles (Wii, PS3, Xbox 360), it means that the most interesting titles are already covered, there are already good articles in here or in other websites to remember them. While there are still some previously unknown, interesting lost games we will cover in the following months on Unseen64, most of future site updates will probably be about obscure cancelled games that not many will care about.

When everyone already know about such unseen games as Zelda URA, Resident Evil 1.5, Fallout: Van Buren, Bio Force Ape, Tengai Makyou III, Akira 16bit, Mario Takes America, Sonic Mars, Sonic X-Treme, Lufia 3, Conker 64, Agharta, B.C., Game Zero, Maximo 3, Elder Scrolls Travels, Kid Icarus Wii, Final Fantasy Fortress or Kameo 2, 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.

You can easily see how it became harder and harder to surprise and satisfy readers with interesting lost games they would have loved to play. You can also easily see how unsatisfied readers could drop their support on Patreon, leaving us with less funds to cover Unseen64 needs.

How to keep up our mission to remember unseen games till the 7th generation of consoles, while still engaging readers and secure steady support on Patreon for Unseen64?

We discussed about this with our patrons during the last year, and thanks to their feedback we organized a possible plan for 2017:

  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 that later created a different masterpiece and even if some of these canned projects could have became 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. More video articles: as we wrote many times before, 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 Tamaki 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 would require more time to create more video articles (especially as the main Unseen64 is italian and Tamaki is already full of work with his videos), 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. A new Unseen64 English Podcast: if everything will go as planned, in a few weeks we’ll upload a new episode of our Podcast dedicated to our patrons, thanks to some friends and collaborators that are currently organizing and recording the episode. If this new podcast will be appreciated by patrons, we’ll keep doing them in the following months as a “thank you!” for their donations.

All of these activities will require a lot of time, efforts and collaboration between people who help the Unseen64 collective, but we really want to keep Unseen64 alive for as much as possible. We will also update our Patreon’s goals to align them with our 2017 plan and to secure funds to cover the time needed to implement it.

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 that 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 that also use their time to remember beta, unreleased and unused gaming documents, together we can save as many unseen games as possible.

unseen64-patreon-2016

Remember: Unseen64 is still online thanks to all the awesome people who made one-off donations and pledges on Patreon: together, we can do it!

We’d like to thank all of you (in random order) who are helping U64 with your donations and support:

Daan Koopman, Sentinator of Team Haruhi, joef0x, Liam Robertson, Mark J. Lang, Thomas Whitehead, David Galindo, Tiago Pereira dos Santos silva  From Porto, Portugal, Mason “SoberDwarf” M., Ryan Jessee, Peter Lomax, Frans Aymes, Emiliano Rosales, Paul Benson, Faisal AlKubaisi, Julian Lord, Shane Gill, Conrad A Fursa, Lukas Steinman, Vitor Takayanagi de Oliveira, Red , Nick Fancher, allan paxton, Pete Imbesi, Robert Dyson, tydaze , Justin Moor, Kristian Binder, Chris Chapman, Anders Moberg, Gabe Canada, Tim Lawrence, Tommy Wimmer, Michael Benkovich, Amy , Oliver Rennie, Hugo Guerra, Thomas.nunn, That Black Guy, Mauro Labate, Olivier Cahagne, Corentin, Andrew Eleneski, Alex MacIntyre, Henry Branch, Matthew , Anders “Captain N” Iversen, Coldi , Dan Berends, Joe Brookes, Austin Murphy, James Jackson, netsabes , Aaron Sharratt, James Champane, Jonathan Pena, Jacob Walker, Jonathan Cooper, Paul Stedman, Viraj , Jrg McJrg, Brice Onken, Alex Stutzman, Guilherme Killingsworth, Pablo Bueno Navarro, Paul , Levi Wyatt, Josh Mann, Brice Dirden, Dan Thomas, Adrian , Ben Cowling, Alex Wawro, Niels Thomassen, Lou , Matthew Gyure, PtoPOnline , Jesus Tovar, Jacob , Brandon , Lisa , Akspa , Martin , Irvin , James Steel, Tony, DJ Gillard, Christopher Cornwell, Goffredo, and everyone else! (did we forget someone?)

We <3 you

 

Best Video Games Books: Our Top 100+ List!

best video games books list

To celebrate the release of our book “Video Games You Will Never Play” (published in September 2016), we would like to suggest to you even more amazing video game books you can read while trapped at home during the upcoming cold winter or to buy as a Christmas present for your nerd cousin who loves video games. There are already many “top 10 books” lists with some nice suggestions (such as the ones at Goodreads, Wikipedia, Games Radar, Heavy, PC Gamer and The New Yorker), but those usually don’t have less known titles we love and often they list the same books over and over. We’d like to suggest many more books related to games, with the help of our readers, like you!

This long list with all our favorite games-related books (available in English) was originally meant to be added as a bonus in our own volume, but as we had to cut a lot of content to fit our articles in the 480 pages limit, this “best video game books” list had to be canned too. In the end we decided to still finish this huge article and to publish it on our website, so here it is!

We also asked to some of our favorite authors and gaming historians (such as Bob Pape, Brian Schrank, Chris Kohler, Clyde Mandelin, Felipe Pepe, Gabe Durham, Jeremy Parish, Jesper Juul, John Szczepaniak, Nathan Altice, Nick Montfort, Rob Strangman and Sorrel Tilley) to suggest a book themselves and in the end, we collected more than 100 titles. We would like to add even more videogames books, to create the most complete list ever to help people to find the most interesting ones. Each book is listed with details, price, number of pages, size and average price on Amazon, so you can easily compare them (remember: always check the current price on Amazon, as they often change day by day and could be on sale!).

If you know of other great video game books that should be added, please leave a message below with a short description to explain why you loved that book, so we can include it in our list! Thanks a lot for your help :)

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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)

video-games-you-will-never-play-unseen64-book-color video-games-you-will-never-play-unseen64-book-blackwhite

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!