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Unreleased Atari 2600 Game Found At Flea Market
VonGuard writes "I was at the flea market in Oakland yesterday when a pile of EPROMs caught my eye. When I got them home I found that they were prototypes for Colecovision games. A few were unpublished or saw limited runs, like Video Hustler (billiards). Others were fully released, like WarGames. But the crown jewel is what look to be a number of chips with various revisions of Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park for Atari 2600. This game was never released and has never been seen. It was a port of the version for Colecovision, and this lot of chips also included the Coleco version. So now I have to find someone who can dump EPROMs gently onto a PC so we can play this never-before seen game, which is almost certainly awful."
The great thing about the age of carts is just what the article touches on...here's a game that never made it to the store shelves but clearly a copy or two was made on actual hardware that somehow made it to this flea market.
But what happens to games today when they're cancelled? I read about games being put on "indefinite hiatus", or just being cancelled with the company essentially throwing their hands up in the air and saying "ain't gonna happen." What becomes of all that code? Since it just sits on the developer's machines, does it just get wiped when they start on a new project?
Maybe someday someone will find a hd in a flea market labeled "Shenmue 3 SVN Repo", but it doesn't seem likely, sadly.
So while we revel in the curios of the past, we ourselves have none to give to future generations.