Video game preservation group Hidden Palace has released over 700 “unique” PlayStation 2 game prototypes and early builds, including God of War II, Shadow of the Colossus E3 2005 demo build, and Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex E3 2001 prototype.
As spotted by Video Games Chronicle, Hidden Palace held a 6-hour livestream over the weekend, in which it showcased pre-release builds from many beloved games. Most of them are playable on PC via an emulator, and the team plans to make more of them available in the near future. We’re looking at approximately 860 GB of data gathered from various sources, making this Hidden Palace’s biggest preservation project yet. The group spent almost a year perusing the differences between the prototypes and the retail releases.
Hidden Palace wrote:
These aging items were miraculously rescued from being destroyed, thrown away, or sold through the herculean efforts of one person. This person not only took on the task of backing up everything in their possession single handedly, but was so overwhelmingly kind enough to let us look at and preserve each item in his collection with no strings attached. Yes that’s right, all of it. For nothing in return.
Just to name a few, we have an E3 prototype of Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex as well as an E3 prototype of Shadow of the Colossus, both based on really early versions of the game. We have pre-Japanese prototypes such as God Hand and Dino Stalker, both also include really cool debugging tools as well! We also have many other builds that contain active debuggers like Dragon’s Lair 3D, Final Fantasy X-2, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2, plus many many many more.
You can check out some of the prototypes in action in Hidden Palace’s Twitch stream archive.
[Source: Hidden Palace via VGC]
