Here’s an exciting little piece of Sega history that’s recently come to light! Former Sega Technical Institute programmer Ken Rose kept a collection of floppy disks from his time at the studio in the early 1990s, and thanks to the preservation efforts of Hidden Palace and DevStash, their contents have now been recovered and documented.
Among the discoveries are prototypes, original source code and development documents from six projects, including Treasure Tails, a cancelled isometric puzzle adventure starring Sonic’s sidekick, as well as Jester, B-Bomb, Dark Empires and Segapede. There’s even an early build of Kid Chameleon. Some of these games were never released, while others survive in playable forms.
What I love most is how much of the development history has survived alongside the games themselves, including the reasons certain projects were cancelled and the people who worked on them. It’s amazing that we’re still uncovering new pieces of Mega Drive history more than thirty years later. I’ve included some of the recovered artwork and prototype screenshots in the article, along with links to Hidden Palace’s original preservation work.
As ever, who knows if this is even worth mentioning, this is just the daily little article for my NeoCities experiment :)
Blows my mind thinking how much stuff just gets lost to history but I’ve worked for companies that were purchased and when everyone left, stuff would just get cleared out by liquidators. Even if we were allowed to grab what we wanted almost nobody bothered.
And, software devs, THIS is why you keep a copy of the code and documentation when you leave.
Not because you might want to use it for malicious reasons. That can backfire.
But, one, your local copy will always be there for your reference, so you can recall a funky solution, or a weird bug and it’s workarounds.
But most importantly… who knows if in 30-50 years that code won’t become something highly sought after?
With the way gamedev works these days, that would be entirely against the NDAs you sign with the company and open you up to legal and financial repercussions on top of essentially making you unemployable by any other game company out there. Doesn’t matter if you leave the company, the NDAs still survive. I completely get where you are coming from and why you are saying that, but it’s just not a good idea in today’s day and age, sadly.
