Update: Popular YouTuber Modern Vintage Gamer has taken a look at some of the prototypes that were released by Project Deluge (including many detailed in this article), which you can watch in the video above.
Original story: If you're a fan of the original Xbox scene, then you'll be very intrigued to know that Project Deluge has just added over 300 OG Xbox prototypes to its archive, spanning everything from unreleased games to early builds.
As described by the team, the full list features "unreleased games, early prototypes, tech demos, localisation prototypes, debugging builds, and some near final builds with debugging features enabled", with many of them taking the form of preview and review builds that were given to journalists ahead of release.
Notably, there are unreleased ports of American Idol, Hail to the Chimp ("which would be released on the 360"), He-Man: Defender of Grayskull and Pac-Man World Rally, along with an unreleased English localisation of Dinosaur Hunting: Ushinawareta Daichi. The batch also includes playable prototypes for unreleased games such as The Red Star, US Open 2003 and The Vatz, and another particularly notable highlight is "a really nice prototype of Psychonauts which is currently the earliest prototype available" - and that's just to name a few!
Here's a bit of what the Project Deluge team had to say about their findings:
"What’s interesting about most of the Xbox prototypes is just how many of them are actually unreleased. Given that Microsoft was a relatively newcomer to the video game industry at the time, and given that the Sony PlayStation 2 was taking the entire world by storm, it’s likely that many developers/publishers got cold feet and decided against porting some games that might not have sold well on the platform.
There was most likely doubt over whether or not the Xbox was even going to be a success at the time, so most developers may not have been willing to put some of their games on the platform. Fortunately for Microsoft, that changed following the successful lifespan of the Xbox 360."
We don't know about you, but we always find protoypes fascinating, so it's great that hundreds of original Xbox games have had their early builds archived in this latest batch from Project Deluge. Excellent work, folks!
What do you make of this release of original Xbox prototypes? Let us know down in the comments.
[source hiddenpalace.org]
Comments 7
I wonder why most of these games didn't get released, surely they spent quite a lot of money on them to begin with
Interesting, wonder where they got them?
And how to play them - not had a chance to look at their site yet.
The worry about Xbox not succeeding (and so likely not bothering with the release costs involved - particularly as couldn't do digital back then) holding games back is what I feared when last generation went so bad for the One - that publishers / devs wouldn't think it worth the cost = less games = less reason to buy in a vicious circle.
I'm glad Xbox have begun to bounce back from that, and they need to be aggressive as that "should we bother with Xbox?" probably hurts it more than anything the competition does.
Will be interested to see any major surprises in here - and wonder in the future if we'll see a similar dump of abandoned Xbox One ports...
@UltimateOtaku91 I'd imagine the money required to finish it and squash any bugs / provide support plus physical production and distribution costs put paid to many if they were unsure of how the Xbox would pan out.
No digital really back then (not for consoles anyway) so would have cost quite a bit and that's before we talk marketing budgets
Can't wait to hear what MVG has to say about all these developments.
It'd be nice if Xbox tried to get most of these made again.
Especially a He-man game
We need a Masters of the Universe game!!!!!!!!
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