Last night video game preservation group, The hidden palace, released more than 700 previous versions of PS2, prototypes, E3 and press release demonstrations at a massive landfill in the group called “Project Deluge”.
The Hidden Palace hosted a stream on Twitch that lasted more than six hours on Saturday night. During this stream, they showcased various versions and pre-release demos of PS2 for various games, including Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex, LEGO Star Wars The Video Game, Crazy Taxi, i Final Fantasy X-2.
Some of these early versions were only seen at trade shows, such as E3, and were built specifically for preview coverage. Other early versions include debugging and beta development versions. All this was found and saved from being sold or thrown away by a person who worked with The Hidden Palace and Internet Archive to properly catalog and upload all of these files. In total, this adds up to more than 850 GB of data.
It’s a treasure trove of video game history that The Hidden Palace spent nearly a year excavating, ordering the constructions in detail, and only keeping unpublished prototypes and unpublished reviews. You can read more detailed details on how the team was able to achieve this a blog post on the group’s website. The short answer: It seems like a lot of work. A lot of work.
And surprisingly, Project Deluge is not over. The team claims to have many more prototypes to explore and plans to release them sooner, but has no more specific date than this.
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