The Internet Is Going Wild Over This Massive Prototype Leak

A massive batch of Dreamcast and Original Xbox game prototypes have been made available online, all thanks to Hidden Palace, a group focused on game archival. As part of an ongoing effort to gather and legally release old video game prototypes and betas, Hidden Palace has enacted Project Deluge, The third and latest wave of the project saw the release of 349 original Xbox prototypes and 135 Dreamcast prototypes.

The original Xbox games include unreleased ports of "Pac-Man World Rally" and "He-Man: Defender of Grayskull," in addition to prototypes of the unreleased games like "The Red Star," "US Open 2003," and "The Vatz." Meanwhile, the Dreamcast batch includes early versions of massively popular released games like "Jet Set Radio" and "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater."

With this most recent batch of games, all of which are available for download from the Hidden Palace website, Project Deluge now includes 1,700 unique prototypes. A large chunk of those prototypes come from the early PlayStation consoles, with 750 PS2 builds and 370 PlayStation builds available on the website in total. 

According to Hidden Palace, these prototypes have been collected from all sorts of places, including defunct studios, developers, and collectors. While old prototypes have surfaced in recent years from massive leaks — like the Nintendo "Gigaleak" — Hidden Palace has continued to stress that it obtained these prototypes legally. Here's what the internet had to say about the latest batch of prototypes uploaded by Project Deluge.

While the preservation of old games and their prototypes is good for the history of video games on its own, plenty of fans are also excited at the prospect of checking these titles out and possibly getting other prototypes down the road. Over on the Games subreddit, u/King_Allant wrote, "Holy s***, this is an enormous win for the history of gaming. What absolute legends."

In response to someone saying that any news about game preservation is a win, u/Ruraraid mentioned that they specifically love preservation news regarding Nintendo, since the company typically seems to try to keep unreleased versions and prototypes out of the public eye. u/Johnetcetc wrote, "The Hidden Palace is such a treasure. Even if I don't have any interest in directly accessing this stuff, it's so great to know it's been properly preserved."

Overall, everyone seems pretty thrilled that Hidden Palace is putting in the work to preserve these prototype builds in a free and open online archive. Due to the nature of transferring these old copies onto the internet, Hidden Palace does not have a set release date for the next wave of prototypes. However, the site did indicate that the team is working towards archiving more prototype games in the near future.