The Internet Archive has been host to lots of content lost over time—mostly including rare content, magazine scans, or even games of old such as the previously unreleased SimRefinery. It takes a lot of dedication to be able to collect articles, write-ups, and footage that date to a few years back. However, it’s even more difficult to find, track, and collate items that talk about canceled or unreleased games.
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One prominent archivist, VGDensetsu, recently uploaded their collection of concept art, footage, videos, photos, and articles about unreleased or canceled projects within the video game community. The archive contains collected articles, documents, screenshots, and other valuable findings which were provided by different parties. Some magazine scans also inhabit the archive, although no mention of magazines like Nintendo Power was included.
Some sources of the files are not indicated, seeing as the archive was a dozen years in the making. VGDensetsu states that their methodology for filing and grabbing documents has changed over the years, so it was hard to keep track of all the sources involved to make this possible. The rationale for uploading was to preserve the files in case they disappear by accident from the archivist’s hard drive, as well as to clear up hard drive space because these tend to be unused.
It’s definitely interesting to see prototypes or completely different versions of games. The hype of finally seeing unreleased games or in-game content adds to the mystique of the pack of files. Unreleased images of games such as Biohazard artwork or screenshots of the previously in-development version of the previously canceled Half-Life 2: Episode 3 are included in the package, which should get a lot of eyes interested. It’s an important duty to archive video game history to help preserve timeless information such as these in the hopes that it can be referenced by future generations.
However, with all the files included, no demos or playable versions of the games could be found. While it would have been great to see something similar to the MS-DOS online game library from a few years back, there might be some legal matters that would need to be cleared. Most of the sources provided are from public websites such as Gaming Alexandria and RetroCDN, as well as various collated tweets from different users.
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Source: VGDensetsu/Internet Archive
