Last night video game conservation group, The hidden palace, has released over 700 early builds, prototypes, E3 and press release demos for PS2 in a massive dump that the group ‘Project Deluge
The Hidden Palace hosted a stream on Twitch that lasted more than six hours on Saturday night. During that stream, they showed a number of PS2 pre-release builds and demos for various games, including Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex, LEGO Star Wars The Video Game, Crazy Taxi, and Final Fantasy X-2.
Some of these early builds could only be seen at trade shows, such as E3, and were built specifically for preview coverage. Other early releases include debug and beta development versions. All this was found and saved from being sold or thrown away by one person, who worked with The Hidden Palace and Internet Archive to properly catalog and upload all of these files. All told, this adds up to over 850 GB of data
It’s a treasure trove of video game history that The Hidden Palace searched through for nearly a year, picking out retail constructions, and keeping only unreleased prototypes and unreleased revisions. You can read more detailed details on how the team did this a blog post on the group’s websiteThe short answer: it sounds like a lot of work. A lot of work.
And surprisingly, Project Deluge isn’t ready yet. The team claims to have many more prototypes to dig through and plans to release more soon, but doesn’t have a more specific date than that.
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H / t VGC.com