Pre-release builds that show how games were made — and unmade
Before Sonic had a name, Sega's team called him "Mr. Needlemouse" — the working name used while Naoto Ohshima's hedgehog beat a rabbit, an armadillo and other candidates to become Sega's new mascot.
A 3D Zelda was first shown in short real-time demonstrations at Nintendo's Shoshinkai and Space World shows in 1995 and 1996 — footage of an older-looking Link that differs noticeably from the game released in 1998.
The earliest public demonstration of Super Mario 64 showed a rudimentary Mario head manipulable by the N64 controller, establishing the hardware's 3D credentials while the game itself was still in development.
GoldenEye 007 began as an on-rails shooter in the mould of Sega's Virtua Cop before Rare's small, largely inexperienced team turned it into a free-roaming first-person game with mission objectives — and added multiplayer only near the end.
id Software's Doom alpha builds from early 1993 featured a radically different monster roster, an alternate HUD design, and weapons that were substantially reworked before the final December 1993 release.
Capcom's original Rockman was shaped by director Akira Kitamura's small team, which considered names such as Rainbow Man before settling on Rockman — and the finished game lacked features, like passwords, that the series later made standard.
Star Fox grew out of Argonaut Software's 3D experiments on Nintendo hardware, which led to the Super FX chip and a collaboration between the British studio and Nintendo's own designers.
A nearly complete localised NES version of Mother — titled EarthBound — was prepared by Nintendo of America in 1989 and 1990 before being cancelled, and the ROM was ultimately released officially by Nintendo in 2015 after sitting unreleased for 25 years.
Final Fantasy VII was first planned for the Super Famicom, with an early story idea set in New York, before Square moved the project to the PlayStation and 3D graphics.
Chrono Trigger's initial concepts, developed when Square assembled the "Dream Team" of Sakaguchi, Horii, and Toriyama in 1992, included a world structure and battle system considerably different from the finished game's approach.
Konami's troubled transition of Castlevania to 3D involved early builds significantly more ambitious than the game that shipped, with a larger castle, more playable characters, and a different camera approach that was progressively simplified as technical challenges mounted.
A very early build of Sonic 2, nicknamed after footage of it appeared on Nickelodeon’s game show Nick Arcade, offering a rare window into the game roughly six months before release.
The version of Halo Steve Jobs unveiled at Macworld New York in 1999 was an open-world, third-person Mac game built on the Myth engine — barely recognisable as the Xbox launch shooter it became.
A 1994 Genesis prototype starring Sonic and Tails linked by an elastic energy tether — the experimental seed that grew into the 32X game Knuckles’ Chaotix.
Shown at Nintendo Space World 2000, Super Mario 128 put 128 Marios on screen at once and was never released as a game. Its ideas ended up scattered across Pikmin, Metroid Prime, Twilight Princess and Super Mario Galaxy.
A disk-based expansion that would have rebuilt Ocarina of Time's dungeons while the original cartridge sat plugged into the console above it. The 64DD died, and Ura Zelda became a bonus disc.
Before Resident Evil 4 became the game that redefined the third-person shooter, it was a supernatural horror story in which an infected Leon hallucinated a hook-armed ghost climbing out of a painting.
A playable build shown at Nintendo Space World in November 1997 and leaked twenty-one years later, containing dozens of Pokémon that were redesigned, reslotted or cut before the games shipped.
A German programmer broke into Valve's network out of curiosity rather than profit, and an unfinished Half-Life 2 escaped onto the internet more than a year before release.
A small run was built before Nintendo abandoned Sony at CES in 1991. One surfaced in a box won at a bankruptcy auction for $75, and sold in 2020 for $360,000.