Last night video game preservation group, The Hidden Palace, released over 700 PS2 early builds, prototypes, E3, and press release demos in a massive dump the group referred to as “Project Deluge”.
The Hidden Palace hosted a stream on Twitch that lasted over six hours Saturday night. During that stream, they showcased 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 were only seen at tradeshows, like E3, and were specifically built for preview coverage. Other early releases include debug and beta development builds. All of 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 catalogue and upload all of these files. All total, this adds up to over 850 GBs of data.
It’s a treasure trove of video game history that The Hidden Palace spent nearly a year digging through, sorting out retail builds, and only saving unreleased prototypes and unreleased revisions. You can read more of the nitty-gritty details about how the team was able to pull this off in a blog post on the group’s website. The short answer: It sounds like a lot of work. A LOT of work.
And surprisingly, Project Deluge isn’t done. 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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