The 3DO Update II [VHS / 1993] | Insight and Mini-Rundown

(Originally published on Tumblr in 2013. Now I'm posting this again, refined, on my own blog because I can. =P)

A screencap from the opening seconds of 3DO Update

II [VHS / 1993]. Giant lips covered in lipstick is seen on
a monitor behind the console seemingly about to devour
it, frightening many potential consumers in the process.

The year is 1993. The Sega Genesis earned itself the majority share of the gaming market against the Super Nintendo. Cartridges were the rule of the land in video games, and the use of compact discs for games were introduced under the premise of vastly improved sound quality, a larger storage capacity meaning bigger, longer adventures, and especially exhilarating cinematic experiences. The Sega Mega CD and TurboGrafx-CD made it to the market first but, the 3DO would embrace this CD technology in its goal to be the most powerful machine on the market.

Here's a little background since I don't feel like writing that much about it tonight. In the summer of 1993 Panasonic showcased its then-state-of-the-art 3DO video game console to the public at the Consumer Electronic Show in Chicago, Illinois. At the mist of the show, Trip Hawkins, founder and president of Electronic Arts, The 3DO Company, and later Digital Chocolate in 2003, present the finalized specifications and printed circuit board to a formally dressed audience full of press members and industry insiders.

The general public was excited of the console, but probably until they learned of the morbidly-high $699.99 price tag (that's about $1,221 in 2018 dollars, folks) that would bar anyone who didn't want to break the bank from making the investment. Following the event, a marketing VHS was sent out to licensees to cover the well-received press conference and to persuade them of the potential the console had. Along with a complimentary hand-signed letter by company president himself, which can be found below or after the jump, the VHS tape featured four segments (including a complete version at 60FPS that I've recently uploaded! 1/11/2024 Edit: Here's an Internet Archive link to the entire upload with everything and no bullshit watermarks on them. =)):

The first segment, A 3DO Experience is a promotional video that was displayed on multiple monitors at Summer CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 1993. Lots of strange, obnoxious FMV games, cheesy, early 90's butt-rock and mediocre CGI, and a monotone emotionless narration by two voice narrators that would bore anyone to sleep. At least, the 3DO port of Dragon's Lair looked nice high-res for its time, right...? Nah, I wouldn't know.

The Panasonic Sales Video is the second segment of this VHS that... is just what it sounds like. A relatively unexciting clip created for a "National Sales Meeting" in May 1993 to business retailers and licensees. Trip Hawkins makes not only an appearance in the middle but a bold declaration that "the 3DO is going to be the biggest product in your store since the VCR," for three R.E.A.L reasons. What are those reasons? I'll make it short for you:

1. A 50x technological jump in power
2. Numerous third-party support
3. The 3DO is an Interactive Multiplayer (what a 90's thing to say!)

The third segment presents the presentation Trip Hawkins gave in front of an audience of suits from the press and industry insiders at the Summer CES 1993 Press Conference held on June 3-6 in Chicago. Check out that silicon he's holding on 10:37 as he says "it's real." "Six months ago [at that time], we had the promise and now we have the reality," said Hawkins, unaware of the grim result that would follow the 3DO's performance just a year after it's launch.

This fourth and final segment shows us clips of the numerous news coverage from such big-name TV tabloid programs as Showbiz Today, Entertainment Weekly, Good Morning America, and Headline News (who the reporter's comments, the 3DO name sounds like something out of Star Trek), for the console after Summer CES 1993. At the end of the video, the Marketplace reported that Trip Hawkins had been awarded the CEO of the Year award in the Bay Area software category by the professional firm Ernst & Young. Good for him.

So in the end, the 3DO didn't do too well thanks to its ridiculously high price and over-reliance of full motion video in the games, among many other reasons that I don't particularly care to mention at the moment. If you wish to explore this part of gaming history, I recommend Wiki-ing it or better yet check out 1UP's Going-Out-of-Business article. It really opens your eyes as to how this console came about in the more detailed explanation of how it it came about. Finally for this article, I'd like to leave with a few photo shots of the letter and tape.

BIOHAZARD 2 (1.5) 1996 Prototype Footage (@60FPS) | V-Jump Festival '96 ...

Some bad glitches in Shenmue I | Shenmue I & II (Steam)

Capcom "Fighter's Edge" In-Store Loop (Minus BGM) [VHS / 1998]

Metal Gear Solid Promo (PlayStation) | Target: Get Into The Game [VHS / ...

Rockman DASH 2: Episode 2 | CFC: Capcom Friendly Club Video Vol. 19 [VHS...

Question: Monetize VHS (promo) tapes?

Boy, it's been a while since I've posted anything on this blog. Here's a quick question for everyone here:

The PSone controller had different shoulder buttons; Genso Suikoden prototype footage from 1994!

So I hear Konami has been quite an asshole lately. The way they mistreatment their workforce, withdrawing from console game production, and the complete, sensational mess that has been the Hideo Kojima divorce. Yuck, a cesspool to be sure.

Let's escape from that to about two decades ago when they were at the twilight years of their dignity. Here's a game that I've hear good things over the years on and off, but have never played. This is Gensou Suikoden.

As an RPG game centered around political struggles in a fictional, fantasy empire, Suikoden was made out of a labor of love from the get-go, starting out as a launch title for an unannounced Konami home console. Very little immediate information about that exists on the internet, but the game, under the imaginatively clever name of "RPG," was in development for a brief time but was moved over to the PlayStation, otherwise codenamed the PSX. A relatively more creative acronym than "RPG," I think. In addition, the script for its sequel was originally used for this game but its creator felt he needed more experience to give it the proper treatment it deserved and instead created a "prequel script" for this game instead. 

In July of 1994 𑁋 about a year and a half before the game's domestic release 𑁋 Suikoden was formally unveiled to players at the V-Jump Festival '94 exhibition in Japan. That's not the only feature in the following clip that was preliminary, though.

We also see a preliminary version of the standard PlayStation controller featuring odd symbols on the shoulder buttons that would later become the numbered R and L buttons.

What buttons are those suppose to say, do you think?

It's rather interesting to see this game unveiled to the gaming public about a year and a half before either the game and console came out. It's thanks to this fact however that we can actually see the early designs for the PlayStation controller. As it is known, the original PlayStation controller went through several dozen iterations before the company settled on its finalized design. The most striking detail seen in are the shoulder button designs on the top of the controller. There are no L or R labeled buttons but instead are some triangle-shaped symbols that I can't make out what they're supposed to be.

Obviously, the controller wasn't finalized at this point in time but it makes clear that Sony Computer Entertainment had provided a 3D console that enabled third-party developers like Konami the confidence they needed to jump onto polygons so soon. Sony lured them into their boat quite well.

Here's some (old) new footage of the unreleased PlayStation version of Superman

Oh, just months since the last update and an hour 'til October starts. I have a bad work ethic for blogs and videos. Tonight, let's talk about a Superman game. One that was made for PlayStation.

After the complete bomb that was the abysmal Superman on the Nintendo 64 in 1999, another attempt by the same developer was made for the PlayStation just a year later.

Long story short, publisher Titus lost the video game license to Superman and thus the game could not be sold without renewing the expensive license. The game was subsequently cancelled afterwards. Since then, it's become a legend among some game prototype enthusiasts for being a completely different game than the original N64 game. The following is screen-recorded footage of the unreleased PlayStation version running on ePSXe, retrieved from an anonymous source (intentionally withheld for the time being), and I've been privileged to upload it all on YouTube with his/her blessing. 



An embedded playlist of the footage divided in three short parts. Let the player play all three or use the links in this paragraph to see them one-by-one.

Unfortunately the footage contained absolutely no sound, therefore the audio heard in the first part plays the opening intro theme repeatedly, while later parts just use music from some of the PlayStation Mega Man games. =P

More VHS crap few would care about (or stuff I find at work in Goodwill)

Wowsers! It's been months since the last update? Let me rev it up here. I've been working at my job at Goodwill for months now and I've been finding some unexpectedly awesome things there since my time there. The following post is not of that level of such but it might be a nice thing for some.

I found a home video tape buried with other crap inside a gaylord that nobody would care about. This one was labeled "DBZ + Adult Swim" in fine-point blue ink on an expectedly worn, generic white label. Out of curiosity, I fired up a recovered VHS player in the item processing area I work in (I'm a "production associate"), popped the tape in, it wasn't what I expected. Lacking the time and luxury to watch all two hours of the tape (time is money and I'm not paid to do that), I decided to chance buying it to watch what I thought would be some Dragon Ball Z goodness. So the next day, I slipped the bastard in a Tomorrow Never Dies VHS box cover, bought it for $0.99 and went home.

I popped the thing into my Panasonic player. It wasn't DBZ or anything Adult Swim related. In fact, apparently what did actually exist on it was three seconds of Inuyasha at the start of the tape and suddenly there's a really boring, over-glorified TV show ─ from fucking G4 of all things ─ about race cars and their douchebag drivers; presumably recording over what was labeled on the tape. Yeah, remember G4? That one channel were Icons aired on and all those bullshit EB Games ads that aired every 15 minutes, and later a bunch of other shows aired that weren't even video game related? Yeah, that channel. They sucked. Just like this tape I blew 99 cents on. What didn't suck though was seeing TV commercials of certain games that I didn't see archived in decent-enough resolution online. 

One was for the 2005 Xbox port of the high-profile, smash-hit Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which by the time this particular commercial aired, the Hot Coffee scandal had just hit public consciousness, inducing lots of congressional shit that era and giving owners of the original release something to giggle about. It's a hot read.

Another was Psychonauts, a fan-favorite game released that same year for every major platform minus the Nintendo GameCube, just like so many multiplatform-bounded games that era. GCN missed out on a lot of good games. Believe it or not, I haven't even touched this game once. Heard about it throughout the years, but I haven't cared to try it. However, the long awaited sequel was recently announced and I know what it's like to have a favorite game series return after a decade-long absence, so here's my unsolicited gift to those fans. I just hope their game doesn't end up in smoke like mine did.

So there you have it, maybe I'll have more articles and YouTube stuff to put up soon. I've got a lot to catch up on so stay tuned.

Sonic Toon (Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric) | Weekly Famitsu Issue #1345 (JP) | 9/25/2014

I actually really hated Knuckles' awkward redesign.

Yikes, it's that game. 

Sonic Boom was a catastrophic failure of a game that no one wanted, expected or cared about. As we all know, the damage made to the brand after having it being partially restored to greatness by Sonic Generations (and brought down again by Sonic Lost World) has arguably been done worse than 2006's abysmal Sonic The Hedgehog. A feat that many didn't think was even actually possible, yet it did. Lone wolf game investigator Tamaki has a terrific video of the whole situation over at his YouTube channel.

The Japanese weren't spared of this game either and from the looks of it, they received it better than the rest of the western hemisphere did, at least under Famitsu's reviewers (this was the same magazine that gave the original Dreamcast version of Sonic Adventure a soaring score of 38/40, Sonic '06 a 30/40, and Generations a 35/40), so take their credibility with a grain of salt.

So I bought this magazine at a Japanese bookstore in San Francisco's Japantown about a year and a half ago. At first, it was about seeing what cool stuff I'd find about Super Smash Bros. for Wii U / 3DS but then I stumbled upon an article about Boom. Page 232 of Weekly Famitsu Issue #1345 is the article about Sonic Boom. If the language itself won't do anyone any favors, then surely the images - and the characters, Metal Sonic and Shadow (at least his katakana-written name) - may.

It always seemed as though the pre-release material made the game looked
better than it did (but then, that's almost always been the case for video games).
Watching that Game Grumps series has made me realize that.

Higher resolution scan can be found and downloaded here.

It's really too bad at this game ended up the way that it did. I knew that this was a spinoff but I thought it was going to have something rather interesting environmental art style going for it. This game was being made by a developer who formally worked on the Crash Bandicoot series under Naughty Dog so with such credentials it's actually disappointing this project resulted in the mess that was but for all I know, it may have just been a case of publisher-interference on Sega's part. That's never a good thing.

Oh well!

Mega Man 64 Transition Prototype

Software porting has always been a thing in digital entertainment. Seeing a game originally released in one, single system would oftentimes be on another in a year's time. That was especially true in the 32-bit era and before it. These days, nobody wants to deal with old stuff from a year before and publishers, who hold the keys to the game's IP, are particularly privy to that and so you see console ports of the same game across different platforms on the same day. 

Mega Man Legends was absolutely no exception to the former, but I'm guessing it was more Capcom wanting to recuperate some of the costs of the original game, since it wasn't the huge commercial success that they wanted. The effort put forth onto this port wasn't stellar either. Last month, me and a couple friends of mine released an early prototype of Mega Man 64 online to some fanfare for Legends enthusiasts like myself.

What you see above is actually an abridged version of the three and a half hour surprise livestream that I did before we released the ROM online. Not having satisfied with how it turned out, I went trimmed it to about 25 20 minutes, making it more entertaining and watchable. Also included are some gags you might want to check out. There are also annotations captions that deliver context behind certain prototypical happenings in the video (turn on [CC]).


Okay so, Mega Man 64. It was sloppily ported. It's a messy, compressed recreation of the original experience. Certain visual effects are nerfed, frame-rate suffers in places that should never/didn't happen on PS1, vaselined textures that undermine the sharp, visual charm of the game, and my personal favorite flub (see 4:50). Having grown up with the original PlayStation version, I see how this port undermines all that was great about Legends. You could also see why I wasn't initially thrilled about this prototype.

A few months ago, me and friend Pixelbuttz and Protodude were tipped off of a prototype build of Mega Man 64 that was in the hands of a collector. The gentleman acquired it from a friend of his and decided to share the knowledge of its existence to AssemblerGames, a now-defunct video game enthusiast forum.

In addition to the reasons I've explained earlier, I wasn't that particularly interested in this build because this would have represented the point in time Legends was being ported to the N64. Having realized that exact sentence I've just said, I figured this might be interesting after all. It wasn't until this collector had posted a video of the prototype in action on YouTube that it finally piqued my interest.

"KANTAN" is suppose to mean easy in Japanese.

The prototype included a menu on the title screen to access a scenario flag switch, a stage select of sorts and the ability to enable or disable certain scenarios in the game. Following this revelation, Pixelbuttz scrambled to gather as much funds as we can to beat out any competition interested in the prototype.

When I say "scramble," what I really mean to say that PB had just frantically made a GoFundMe page not realizing what hurdles it would take to overcome the complications that came about and what a royal pain-in-the-ass lesson it would be to learn not to repeat again (never resort to GoFundMe, stick with PayPal only). PB contacted 100,000 Strong to spread the word of this effort to bring more people to contribute. We just wanted the ROM of this thing, because we knew logistics would complicate things with the physical goods (and, boy, will we get into that in a minute).

Within a day or so, we acquired $400+ until the dude offered us to pay him that amount and he would compensate for the rest of the cost. Cool guy.

We thought we were over that mountain -- until the package arrived at customs. Some asshole basically told the bloke that he not only had to pay a certain expensive fee to get it delivered to his residence, but that they were essentially taking the package hostage until that amount was paid for. He actually had to drive to there and explain what the hell it was. Thankfully, it was all resolved and soon after that he dumped the ROM. Now it's all preserved for eternity.

I'd like to thank everyone who contributed to the recovery of this prototype. We now have another piece of Mega Man Legends history preserved and we can also see what a complete mess the port already was in its transition from PlayStation to N64. If you'd like to see what is being found so far, go hit up the prototype's page at The Cutting Room Floor.

Makoto Tomozawa: Exclusive Interview w/ Former Capcom Music Composer (Mega Man, Resident Evil (1996) + RE1.5)

(Originally published at the now-defunct DASH Republic in March 2012. Re-edited and expanded for Tumblr in 2013. Finalized for January 2016 on The Game Informant.)

Makoto "V. Tomozo" Tomozawa adjusts
audio equipment during the production of
Street Fighter IV, circa January 2010.

Under the pseudonym V. Tomozo, as it was Capcom's policy to obscure talents' names back then, Makoto Tomozawa became well-known for composing music for several of the more popular early titles in the Mega Man franchise, including Mega Man X and Mega Man 7 for Super Nintendo (while also supposedly lending a hand in Dr. Wily's Revenge for Game Boy). He would later be best known for his work in the two main Mega Man Legends entries years later.

He continued to be credited under the pseudonym until Resident Evil in 1996, when 3D polygonal games were becoming the norm and the talent it took being more valued and recognized. Tomozawa would work briefly on the first draft of Resident Evil 2 (Resident Evil 1.5) right until it was scrapped. As soon as that game entered redevelopment in 1997, Tomozawa would be reassigned to compose music for Mega Man Legends, the first major 3D Mega Man game for PlayStation.

His other work consisted of titles from other well-known Capcom properties, including the Dino Crisis series on PlayStation. Tomozawa returned to the Resident Evil franchise one last time as a co-composer for the remake in 2002. One year later, after the release of P. N. 03, he left the company to join the Dimps Corporation and work on the highly-celebrated Street Fighter IV. In 2010 he would reunite with the Blue Bomber in Mega Man 10, composing Strike Man's stage theme.

Around the time of the Mega Man Legends 3 cancellation catastrophe in summer of 2011, I had a chat with Makoto Tomozawa on Twitter. Being the huge fan of the Legends series and some of the Resident Evil games in particular, I wanted the opportunity to speak with him about his past years at Capcom. He gladly accepted and over a period of months, he and I replied back and forth in an on-and-off manner to the point where he unfortunately dropped out on the middle of Legends 1 portion of our chat.

But from what I did gather, he didn't hesitate to admit that the Mega Man Legends projects were among the higher points of his time at Capcom.

Arron - OKeijiDragon: Hello, are you Makoto Tomozawa (友澤　眞) who worked at Capcom Co. Ltd (カプコン)?

Makoto Tomozawa: Yes, I once worked at Capcom, but I retired from the company.

Arron: Oh hello, Mr. Tomozawa! Pleased to finally meet you. I am a big fan of your work in Mega Man Legends. =)

Tomozawa: Thank you very much!!! It was one of my favorite works.

You can catch how the interview unfolded by clicking the jump!

A new YouTube splash video is in order!

Everyone making quality videos on YouTube needs to have a splash page about them. They need to address viewers' questions like, who are you? What do you have to offer? Why should I care about the trivia you're spouting to me? Well, that last part is your prerogative but let me explain for a bit. If you've read what's on my blog here, you'll get a taste of what I'm gonna post on YT. In fact, if you've really been paying attention you'll notice the two actually go hand-in-hand. Hey, I gotta do something on the side besides my full-time job you know. 

But that doesn't mean I'm just gonna throw something together, throw my hands up and say F*** everybody, I'm giving you guys quality videos of annotated game playthroughs (because I hate any LP commentary that isn't Game Grumps) in 1080p60, archived digitized VHS/LD videos (also in 1080p60, I've got a big back catalogue of such media that I'm looking back into to represent them in the best possible quality for archival), prototype coverages (OK, just playthroughs of certain game prototypes, oftentimes me doing YT-poop style ones. You'll see my highlights on the splash video), information videos about certain subjects in certain games (usually my favorites like Mega Man Legends and Resident Evil, to name a few), some glitch videos, and of course I aspire to do more from those subjects.

So without further ado, here's my brand new, mint-chocolate chip backgrounded splash video.

Here's to a good start in 2016, too. I'm gonna make it my new years resolution to be more dedicated to this blog in the following year than I have been all this year. Can my infinitesimal audience help me drive myself to that resolution?

I've held this sales video of Resident Evil 2 from 1997 for one year, until now.

Because either I kept forgetting or I just stopped caring, but tonight I'll just shut up and provide you with a 30-minute loop sales video for Resident Evil 2, recorded in 60 frames per second and upscaled to 1080p HD.

Dated November 16, 1997 (so it says on the front label), the footage seen here presumably comes from the fan-called "BETA 2" build that was burned around the time this sales video was sent out to retailers. The familiar, iconic Resident Evil 1.5 trailer theme plays throughout the loop, and it contains some differences from the final version (one thing comes in mind is the unused bear taxidermy in Chief Irons' creepy torture dungeon).

As I had mentioned earlier this year on my Capcom 2000 VHS video article, this is the second of three tapes I purchased last year in an eBay auction. The remaining tape I have would be Fighter's Edge.

I'll say nothing else till a question gets asked. Enjoy.

Here's something about an unused track in Resident Evil 2

Update: Holy crap, today is my blog's one year anniversary too. Happy Birthday to The Game Informant!

You can already tell by previous posts, but I'm a big fan of Resident Evil. Classic Resident Evil if you may and Resident Evil 2 is among one of my favorite Capcom games and probably one of the very few in the franchise that actually leaves a good, thrilling impression on me as a player today. Its infamous first draft and highly publicized revisions have also earned itself the reputation of being one of the most high-profile games in the subject of prototype and unreleased video game content today. 

So for the night before this year's Halloween, we'll briefly go over a video I published nearly four years ago that details two unique similar music pieces hidden in the sound code for Resident Evil 2 that can't be heard normally in the game. The music pieces sound as though they are actually variations (which I decided to call them) of one another, which you can listen to below on the embedded link.

As we hear in the video, the first variation sounds as though it's a rough mix, as it contains the least instrumentation. The second variation sounds much more refined, containing at least one more instrument playing in the track. Presumably, this would have been the final draft before it would be disused in the game's sound code.

Sometimes, music pieces are composed for specific moments before scenes in a movie, TV show, or game is completed. When a scene is sent to the cutting room floor, usually everything is cut along with the scene. In this case, these particular music tracks were left behind as the scenes had been ditched in favor of the form we got in the final form. How these would have fit in the game remains unknown.

Seeking for answers, I spoke to lead Resident Evil 2 music composer Masami Ueda on Twitter in which he gave the following response:

Two songs are probably, I think it was music for the Sherry. Is what I was composed. QT @OKeijiDragon: @retronauts @GoNintendoTweet

— 上田雅美 (@PG_ueda) February 8, 2012

Ueda-san vaguely recalls composing these two tracks for the game, but was able to recall their purpose. They were meant to be a theme for Sherry Birkin, the young girl who accompanies lead female Claire Redfield in their escape from Raccoon City. 


The pieces were originally discovered in a PSF zipped folder at Zophar.com, a game emulator and hacking resource website. A PSF. (PlayStation Sound Format) is a sound file that often holds the synthesized sound data in various PlayStation games. Cracking the format required computer hacking and disassembly skills. The individual who originally ripped the tracks from the game's sound directory and uploaded them on to Zopher in the first place is currently unknown. I'd like to thank that individual for finding these bits.

Wanna know what my Halloween treat this year is for you guys? If you're a Resident Evil fan like me, I think you'll like it a lot. Stay tuned.

Here's a random proto track and an newly-ripped E3 trailer (@60FPS) from Mega Man X5

Three months!? Gosh, I've been out for a while.

I've been in the mood for prototype/unreleased games again lately. This time, I've taken a listening to a track I've ripped and uploaded on YouTube a year ago, from a prototype version of Mega Man X5 dated May 1, 2000.

The biggest difference to note about this track is in the middle. The first fifty seconds are consistent to the final version, but after that the main verse (or bridge, whatever's the right term for it) becomes different. If you ask me, this version emits the vastness of space much more than the final one (though the stage actually takes place in a planetarium, surprise suprise). Out of all the tracks in the proto, this one is my favorite.

The prototype itself contains a large number of rudimentary elements indicative of its progression into it's final form, all of which you can find them documented at the Cutting Room Floor. The US preview trailer, unveiled at E3 2000 convention in Los Angeles, CA that year, appears to be from this build of the game.

If you want to see the whole VHS rip in it's entirety, you can find it here and reminisce about the old days when Mega Man (and Capcom) was a bigger brand than it is today. 

Song Similarities #1: Sonic CD and Slam Dunk

Ever watch a show or a movie and notice a song in the background you thought sounded remarkably familiar to another song you've heard elsewhere before? I have. Which is why I made the unoriginally-titled Song Similarities. I'm sorry.

Inspired by the Sonic Retro forum's "This Song Sounds Like X" thread, I've began making a short clip, of hopefully several to come, that highlights interesting similarities between a pair of songs that strike me as strong coincidences that particularly resonate with me.

Now, one thing Id like to note. I'm not trying to persuading my audience that "OMG (insert artist) must have done music for (insert IP), this is like MJ/Sonic 3 all over again!" I am just simply creating these videos of what I find are trivially interesting that I nonetheless feel would be worthy of bringing up

In this specific comparison, a BGM from one scene in episode 22 of the hit anime Slam Dunk features a melody structure that sounds quite similar to the present version of the level Tidal Tempest Zone from the popular game Sonic CD. Yes, it may seem like a generic beat today but one of the

Sonic CD came out in Japan on September 23, 1993, while the Slam Dunk episode aired on TV Asahi in Japan on April 16, 1994. Any possible referencing, if at all, would have to have occurred after the game's Japanese release.

Let's take a look at the V-Jump build of BIOHAZARD (Resident Evil)

In a time when Street Fighter and Mega Man where the biggest names in Capcom's arsenal of video games in the early 1990s, 3D polygonal games had just begun to be a thing and polygons consisted mostly of origami figures that resembled moving pyramids and stationary chunks of sausage blocks, figuratively speaking. BIO HAZARD, or as commoners call it Resident Evil, would become the company's first bold experiment working with 3D polygons that would pay off in a major way.

Let's set the clock back to late summer of 1995. The PlayStation was already less than a year old in Japan, while BIO HAZARD had been in development for some time already. At this point in time, the game had just moved on from its "co-op" experimentation period (which not much is known about, and if I can even say it was co-op, actually) and into the period where survival was mandatory and isolation horror would shape up the final form it would assume.

On stage, director Shinji Mikami and supervisor Masahiko Kurokawa would present this direction to the silent audience of hundreds at the V-Jump Festival '95 in Japan.

This footage has been around for a long time now and in fact some of you might even recall seeing it on Inflames' website or other familiar locale. For the purpose of preservation (and because I can't stand the quality of the original rip anyways), I've once again taken upon myself to purchase the original VHS source to bring to you remastered footage of the segment in 1080p60.

So the narrative is set in the near-future (for the time of the game's release) of 1998 at the northwest side of the United States where S.T.A.R.S, a police force stationed at Raccoon City, is called in to investigate a series of bizarre murders committed in the outskirts of their city. Upon receiving no word from Bravo team, the team that was initially dispatched the previous evening to find any clues to intercept the supposed killers at the Arklay Mountains, Alpha team arrives swiftly to locate their missing members.

I have an A.A degree in Journalism and I can tell you that that's a
really terrible newspaper headline for a news story.
Not that mine for this blog post is much better.

To their horror, they discover the grisly remains of their compatriots. The vicious dogs responsible for the deaths appear abnormal, and set their eyes and noses on the remaining Alpha members, killing one of them by the neck, and chasing the rest to a nearby abandoned mansion full of zombies and other horrific monstrosities. Now taking desperate refuge inside the establishment are three (six?) remaining S.T.A.R.S members: Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, and Albert Wesker. They don't know where Barry Burton is or that Rebecca Chambers, who had one hell of an horror fest with an escaped convict the previous night, is somewhere inside. Thanks for leaving them behind, go to hell Brad Vickers.

OK, whatever. Cool story.

*Until REmake came and destroyed every single RE game that
came before it (Electronic Gaming Monthly #80, March 1996).

Upon the unveiling, comparisons were already being made between Resident Evil and the preceding Alone In The Dark, released four years prior. The two share similar horror and gameplay philosophies, but the key difference being that Resident Evil's graphics kicked ass* according to Mikami. He wouldn't be wrong though, it did prove itself as an immersive horror game with an intricate level of graphical detail into the polygon character models and CGI backgrounds even during the advent of the pre-rendered computer graphics craze in video games at the time.

The V-Jump prototype is dated
August 4, 1995.

So onto the prototypical context of the footage itself. First off, only a handful of areas of the first floor mansion are actually playable and the camera positions in some of these areas are drastically different. For example, in one angle, the camera appropriated to the first floor door leading to the first zombie is positioned behind the banister from the second floor (which I find the angle itself interesting, actually). 

Jill Valentine is stands at the front stairs on the first floor of the mansion. She doesn't say much other than "I'll stand watch here." Nothing else. Interestingly, despite her presence in this prototype, Jill isn't actually seen in the embedded footage above. My guess is that in between the aforementioned previous prototype version and the leaked August 4th prototype, her model had just been redone from her previous, implemented design. But that would mean that there had to have been a build of that that existed at some point.

One of the elements I find more interesting is the lack of a finalized set of voice samples for Chris, possibly in Japanese. Presumably, this build was created at a time when the game was still planned to feature Japanese language performances. There's even a set for Jill as well. Take a sample (for more, check out the prototype's page that I sometimes update at The Cutting Room Floor):

Chris:      |     Jill: 

Aside of that, and a snake that shows up from almost out of nowhere at the exit to the garden, there's not much else in the build that provides more of the game than the later protos exhibit. Beyond this prototype, there are at least two more other prototypes (three if you include the Trial Edition) that proceed the progress of the game's development. For now however, the focus is just for this build only. Sometime in the future, I'd like to explore those other builds. If there is a prototype of this game that you'd like for me to explore and document in detail, I'd be happy to.

I'm more motivated to start and complete projects based on the level of demand for their release, and in fact I've invited YouTube users to like this comment I've made about remaking a video about the Japanese dialogue that never materialized in the final game. You can too. Otherwise, hit me up at Google+ or Twitter if you want me to talk about it more.