The Unseen life of Alphas and Beta games
⏲ 3 min
Once upon a time, there was a game that will never be seen. We treat a game like a house, assembled piece by piece: Level 1 complete, "texture_452_brick.png" done, until the game is complete. It's more like building a car without specs, realizing midway that the wheel is welded onto the left passenger door and that suddenly we're told we need a scooter. Did I tell you that the market analysis team says we need a bus?
What happens to the half-baked car? The broken scooter?
We delete it and sometimes reuse parts here and there.
A lot of the time, this version of this car, the game, even if broken, is rarely archived. It's a distant memory for the developers, lost in a Perforce/Git branch or just deleted. Sometimes we catch a glimpse of these versions in a trailer at the (defunct) E3, a playable demo at another convention, or a screenshot sent to game journalists.
We need a proper museum of unfinished hearts. I want to wander through every version of Half-Life 2 from 1998. I want to be able to play every version of Duke Nukem Forever that existed. I want to be able to play the original versions of Cyberpunk 2077.
At the very least, I could see some breadcrumbs from the digital archaeologists of Unseen64 and TCRF or some unauthorized leaks lost around the internet of these games. Many of these builds are gone, deleted or overwritten, sitting on nearly dead hard-drives in some developer's basement, assuming they aren't nuked out of fear of breaking NDAs.
We archive movie outtakes, early music demos or even sketches naturally. Games? Rarely. If the publisher's milestone or the objectives of the vertical slice are not met, it's erased. The final product is the ONLY product.
Here's my hot take: the best version of a game may be the one that never shipped.
See you next time.
Other examples cited: