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.

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

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.

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 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. 

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.

Watching prototype footage of games are like dreams (NiGHTS Into Dreams...)

Or I don't know, I'm just trying to be clever.

Anyways, one of the best ways of preserving and observing video game prototypical media is collecting footage of them in action on game catalog tapes.

Sega Video Magazine is a good place to start. They're a series of game catalog VHS tapes distributed in Japan by Sega Enterprises that promoted and centered exclusively around Sega's own games and games from other publishers during the Mega Drive and Sega Saturn eras. A lot of these tapes have footage of games that haven't taken their final forms yet, which oftentimes can exhibit strong, interesting differences in the content from the final releases. The spectrum of this can range from minor to extreme.

NiGHTS into Dreams... doesn't really fall on either side, but lies more in the left-side of the middle. The clip below covers the world unveiling of the game that took place inside the Tokyo Prince Hotel on March 27, 1996 in Japan. Following that segment is an on-screen interview with some of the then-most respected developers at Sonic Team within Sega, who were also responsible for Sonic's greatest games ever. Producer and main programmer Yuji Naka, director Naoto Oshima, and co-game designer Takashi Iizuka take screen time to tell us their stories as to how the beginning of development came about. Unsubbed.

Scattered throughout the interview is footage of the game in it's early stages of development, including the first level Spring Valley that has a different level and object layout. Many of the sound effects differentiate from the final and even the music sounds unrefined, particularly The Dragon Made a Loud Scream. Turn on the video annotations and it'll elaborate the specifics to you.

I've said this many times already but Nico Nico Douga is quite the treasure trove of Japanese gaming history, featuring various promotional videos of various games spanning several decades starting from the 80s. I remember that Super Mario Bros. 3 video that was a big hit with proto enthusiasts in 2011 after it was found on NND. Hopefully, someone will be kind and interested to provide a translation of the interview above.

Rockman Neo [Mega Man Legends demo] Analysis Video (With Annotations)

(Originally published at the now-defunct DASH Republic and Tumblr in 2013. Now I'm posting this again, refined, on my own blog because goddamn it I can, that's what.)



At a time when the third dimension was taking over the gaming landscape in the mid-1990s with 3D polygonal-based consoles, 2D-native characters of previous generations were making the leap to 3D, often to mixed results. Franchises like Super Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy made the jump to 3D and closely followed their 2D gameplay concepts. Mega Man's transition wasn't familiar. 

In what could be called one of the boldest transitions to 3D gaming ever, Capcom completely re-imagined the very core of Mega Man for his first major entry in the world of triangular-shaped polygons and textures. No longer did you select your level on a menu. No longer did you jump and shoot across side-scrolling stages and fight eight robot masters and anthropomorphic robot animals, or fighting evil scientists and rogue reploids. It wasn't gonna be the same Mega Man we knew. Not anymore.

Pictures by GodDamnProtoman.

Ah, hell nah. This was Mega Man Legends. You explored inside abandoned ancient dungeons. You shot at creepy bloodthirsty robots that live in said dungeons. You talked to goddamn talking monkeys and legomen. You live in an airship that crash lands on an island that becomes invaded by pirates who gave you psuedo-Team Rocket vibes. You fought a vaguely effeminate, psychopathic cyborg that wants to invoke a skynet-like apocalypse on humans that aren't even humans but "Carbons." You can kick cans over to a bakery and get free money. You could kick animals if you wanted to. In 3D.

So you have these awesome concepts that don't fit into the traditional Mega Man formula and yet it identifies itself as such. How do you market this game to your core fanbase, and the mainstream at large? Well, you create a demo and you include it in the same demo disc of a highly-anticipated sequel to your biggest-selling PlayStation game, with the director's cut release of that game in Japan. Enter Rockman Neo.

Capcom included this demo in the second disc of first edition copies of the Japanese version of Resident Evil: Director's Cut in 1997. The video above demonstrates the several major differences in gameplay, audio and visual content in this pre-release that the annotations in the video will elaborate over.

Mega Man Legends went through many name changes in its development. First, Rockman Neo in Japan, whereas the English name would officially be known as Mega Man Neo when it was showcased at E3 1997 in Atlanta, Georgia; followed by the final Japanese name Rockman DASH. Mega Man Nova (really?) was a likely candidate before someone at Capcom USA or Japan recalled a boring lecture from their astronomy classes in school and figured how lame the name sounded, and finally settled upon... you should know by now.

Yes I know its 35 minutes long (!) but it's full of information, tons of beta facts, and fun stuff that supplements background to this demo. Plus, there's references to TauVertex's Mega Man Legends Abridged series. So take a seat and enjoy all the juicy details this demo has!

If you're even more interested in Rockman Neo, you should check out the Rockman Neo page give at The Cutting Room Floor! Lots of fascinating material found inside the games you thought gave you everything it offered!

Prototype Time! | Mega Man Legends 2 (English Debug Prototype)

Last March, Protodude approached me with a few Mega Man prototypes he had on his possession. The first was a proto of Mega Man X5, the third being a "late"-English localization build of The Misadventures of Tron Bonne circa months before it's North American release, and the second in-between...

...an English debug prototype of Mega Man Legends 2, dated July 12, 2000. This was by far, surprisingly, the most interesting of the three Mega Man prototypes that Protodude shared to me behind closed doors. I held onto this for a while before it was leaked onto the net, mostly due to video production reasons and to start writing a page for this at the The Cutting Room Floor.

So wait, wait, wait. What exactly does "debug" mean? What is it for and why should we care about this, aside of serving as a view of the game's development?

So (to my understanding) debugging basically means to look for bugs, meaning any defects, in the whole game's programing and fixing them all of them as much as possible. This particular debugging prototype was used to assess the programming of the game during Rockman DASH 2's localization process into Mega Man Legends 2.

Late 1995 V-Jump Footage of the cancelled TwinBee Miracle [PS1]

I've never played a TwinBee game before nor do I even know how any of the games play. In fact, I've only actually just watched the footage below after rendering this clip, as it was a recent request and I had only just decided upon rendering and uploading it yesterday. And with that out of the way, here it is:

Unseen64 has an brief article this particular entry of the series that was planned for PlayStation but was unfortunately canceled in early 1996. Not a whole lot is known about it, let alone why it was canceled, but judging from the V-Jump 1995 footage, TwinBee Miracle was to be an quirky 2D RPG by Konami based on its top-scrolling shooter roots with colorful characters to meet and some cartoony worlds to explore. It does look like an RPG I would have played.

Its always too bad to see games that seem to have great potential get canceled. Not to be too off-topic but the greatest gaming tragedy I can think of off the top of my head is Star Fox 2, the sequel to the SNES Super FX megahit of the same name. Thankfully, there are prototypes of that game out in the wild internet for everyone to play and see for themselves the marvel that game is. I'm glad to have made some videos out of it too. Hopefully, we'll see a build of Miracle in the future.

Buried Game Treasure: Next Generation Magazine CDs

(Originally published on 1UP.com and Tumblr. Now I'm posting this again, refined, on my own blog because I don't give a damn anymore.)

The front disc envelope of
Next Generation (Sept. 1997)
featuring Cupid probably praying
for a giant meteorite to drop on
to Mother Earth anytime now.

Remember those times when you bought a shrink-wrapped magazine from a supermarket or a bookstore, and you got a free disc of cool stuff inside them? Back then, the internet was this underdeveloped, yet still awesome tool to find the latest news on anything in general at the time, especially gaming news. Yet, anything through a crappy dial-up connection (remember that too?) would take forever for things — like videos — to finish downloading onto our PCs, so for a lot of us we resorted to these discs that came with image and video previews of upcoming games.

A few years years ago, I discovered an ISO on my hard drive called the Next Generation - September 1997, an example of disc containing such cool content. These were discs that were distributed in copies of Next Generation Magazine when you bought the magazine at the time. Included in this particular disc were lots of low-quality 320x240 MOV videos of PlayStation, Sega Saturn, & Nintendo 64 games that were featured at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) at Atlantic, Georgia in mid-June of 1997.

I've found many clips of many different games in their prototype forms, including Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, Mega Man Neo (Mega Man Legends), and Sonic R, all in their pre-release glory. The following videos have been edited to correct the contrast issues the videos had when it was first produced. They looked terrible (view this comparison: twitpic.com/9d1v6q).

This old early prototype footage of Crash Bandicoot 2 features several differences that indicate how early into production this game was when it was first announced at this convention. The video above features brief annotations that go over said differences, including the original HUD font used from Crash 1, different object placements, etc. There's more footage where that came from too (give it a watch too).

This footage of Sonic R features what appears to be a slightly (don't quote me on that, watch and decide for yourself) stage layout at the end of the stage. Different HUD (this was a common beta trait from those days, wasn't it?), and character icons, camera angles, etc. There might be a better quality version on YouTube somewhere, but I didn't find it until after this video was uploaded then.

Next up, sp,e old prototype footage of one of my closest-to-heart games ever, Mega Man Legends, which was known at the time as Mega Man Neo. Just like the first two, this video includes annotations that accentuates the various rudimentary differences that indicate just how early into production this 3D Mega Man title was when it was first quietly announced at the time. It's amazing seeing how much content and concepts were experimented on this game, it doesn't even strongly resemble the final game know today.

Last but not least, another valuable video I found was an video interview of former CEO of Nintendo of America, Howard Lincoln. Topics discussed in this interview include the Nintendo 64's early performance in the west of that year and their strong relationship with Rareware, the developers of Donkey Kong Country, Killer Instinct, Banjo-Kazooie, and GoldenEye 007. You know, really great games.

Backside.

As the internet grew to become the multimedia world it is today, the necessity of CDs packed with videos shrank as sites like YouTube and Google Video took over to allow users, fan communities, and media and game companies to upload videos without worrying about their own bandwidth and file sizes. I remember Nintendo Power coming packed with DVDs of trailers and such, but that was like in 2006 just as YT got around. YouTube and the internet has really made our lives easier.

Before I forget, I can't remember where I found the ISO in the internet originally, but in case the download source is no longer available, here's an ISO of the disc that's now readily available at the Internet Archive. I hope you guys get something neat out of this.