Lost Video Games Discovered Years Later

It takes a lot of work to make a video game, but some of them still don't make it out into the wild. But even if they don't make it to an official release, some games just have a way of being discovered, whether developers wanted them to or not.

From long-lost Resident Evil and Star Fox sequels to an aborted Ecco the Dolphin follow-up planned for the Dreamcast, we've put together some of the coolest games that were lost then rediscovered years (and sometimes decades) later.

If you lived in Japan back in the mid-1990s, you may have been lucky enough to pick up a Satellaview for your SNES. The peripheral was essentially a satellite modem that attached to your SNES and sent down exclusive data. Considering this was the 1990s, it was wildly ahead of its time. The Satellaview didn't find much of an audience and would eventually fade into obscurity. But now a fascinating relic from that era is being rescued. Fans have found some game files from an exclusive Kirby game called Kirby no Omocha Hako, or Kirby's Toy Box, which beamed to the Satellaview and featured 10 different mini-games. Four of those games have shown up for auction, and fans are trying to acquire them and make them available for all.

Characters like Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog get most of the spotlight, but the Rayman franchise has also served up some of the best platforming action in history. Turns out there was one more Rayman game out there just languishing on a flash ROM chip, an unreleased version developed for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) and shelved before it could be released. The game's original creator, Michel Ancel, discovered the long-lost disc and revealed it to fans via social media. The version here looks to be an early take on what would eventually become the first Rayman game on the Sony PlayStation and Atari Jaguar (remember that one?). The graphics here look different than the finished version on other consoles, and it seems this is a peek at the very genesis of the character who would go on to span several more sequels (including the excellent Rayman Origins on modern-day consoles) for decades to come.

The Resident Evil series is big business in video games, and one of the easiest (and most lucrative) ways to capitalize on an existing game is to port it over to a different system. You've already put in the brunt of the work making the game, and by bringing it to another console, you open up a larger audience to buy it. Win, win. That was the case with Capcom's port of the first Resident Evil title to the Game Boy Color, at least until the publisher pulled the plug because it turns out it's not all that easy to bring such an ambitious (for the time) game to Nintendo's classic handheld. With a good chunk of development complete, Capcom axed the game because it didn't live up to the franchise's standards. That looked to be the end of the story, until a collector discovered the ROMs for the game (which was 90 percent complete!) in 2015 and released them for fans after a crowdfunding campaign. Finally, the long lost Resident Evil adaptation had been found.

Oh, the strange saga of Bio Force Ape. This video game was first announced in the early 1990s and was showcased in some video game magazines at the time. It looked as weird as it sounds, and focused on a superpowered chimpanzee who has to fight his way through a maze to rescue his adopted family. It was described as quirky, weird, and extremely fast-paced. Then it vanished off the face of the Earth, never to be released. It was all quiet until 2010, when an alleged version of the game popped up for bid on a Japanese auction site. A group of preservationists raised money to buy it, and it turns out they didn't find a developer build of the game — but a virtually complete version of the game. It was just never released. The near-final build has since been dropped online for adventurous fans looking to go down a weird, NES rabbit hole of what could have been.

It'sg no secret the Sega Saturn was pretty much demolished by the original PlayStation, and you can list the console's botched launch and lack of flagship games among the reasons. But one of the biggest downfalls of the Saturn is certainly the fact that it never featured a flagship Sonic the Hedgehog title. Yes, it had the Sonic R racing game and some collections of previous games, but nothing to really make it a must-own for Sonic fans. But it was so close! Sonic X-Treme was being developed for the Saturn as the first, fully 3-D Sonic the Hedgehog game — and it featured some gravity-defying elements that would eventually be incorporated into other games down the line. But the project ran into problems on the technical side, and Sega eventually pulled the plug. For the better part of a decade, that looked to be the end of the story, until a collector paid $2,500 for the only working demo of the game in existence in 2006. By 2007 it was leaked online, and volunteer programmers teamed up to polish the long-lost Sonic game and make the existing level playable for fans.

The long, strange saga of Mario 64DD. To talk about this adaptation of Mario 64, you first have to talk about the Nintendo 64DD. The short-lived console add-on was designed to attach to the Nintendo 64 and increase the amount of storage it could hold with a new type of discs. The add-on was a major flop, and only a handful of games were ever released for it. Nintendo was initially developing an adaptation of Mario 64 for the Nintendo 64DD, though it never actually made it out of development — especially once Nintendo started turning its attention toward developing its next console, the GameCube. The game basically faded into legend until 2014, when a collector discovered an unreleased beta version of Mario 64DD. Sadly, the game appears to be relatively early in its development cycle, and what does exist is largely similar to the released version of the game on the Nintendo 64. So it looks like we'll never know exactly what Nintendo was cooking up with this one.

Ecco the Dolphin is one of Sega's quirkier franchises, but no less beloved by fans. The series put players into the, umm, fins of a dolphin who travels through time and visits the ancient city of Atlantis. It's weird, ambitious and a whole lot of fun. Sega revived the franchise for the excellent Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future on Dreamcast, with the title being named one of the best games of the year. Sega was keen to get a sequel in development, so work ramped up on Ecco II: Sentinels of the Universe. The publisher pulled the plug during development due to the Dreamcast itself being discontinued (R.I.P.), and Sentinels of the Universe looked to be lost to the, well, universe. Until 2016, when fans discovered a ROM of the unfinished game and released it online for fans to check out. The game was apparently found on discs accompanying a Dreamcast development kit, which was acquired by a preservationist.