With all of the prototypes and unreleased games floating around out there, it is much more common for us to come across something that was reported on in the press at one time or at least that it has a title screen. In this discovery however, the circumstances just leave us with ‘Unknown’ as a title.
As the story goes over at the NEO-GEO Forums, user NeoTurfMasta purchased a NG development board back in March 2015, where he began the work of recovering the data from the board as soon as it arrived. Initially the prospects of it didn’t look too promising, thanks to a lot of corrupt data and some data indicating that it was supposed to be Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer, which was released back in 1995. Upon further investigation, NTF came across a unique test menu and shortly after that he got the game to boot. It turned out it was not VFG at all but something else entirely. With 12 characters that belonged to one of three classes, it looked like it was intended to be a fairly deep fighter. Here is a video of the character selection screen, interesting to see the unfinished combatants:
Unfortunately the files needed to show things like the HUD, sound, etc were dead so it is unknown exactly what this game is. Other aspects of it were unfinished as well however, a user on the NG forums by the name of Shou-sama (who I believe is the same person behind the Shou Time blog) said he is in contact with someone who was formerly with Technos to get the “final code base” for this game, so just hang tight.
This game was also at the Midwest Gaming Classic 2016 event this weekend, where users got a chance to try it out:
For a late update on this situation: the game was tentatively titled Dragon’s Heaven and it would have featured an extensive story shared through text. It used elements of Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer for the code base, hence the reason why the dev board had that game’s name on it. It wasn’t being done by Technos however but FACE, which had a handful of games to their name, nothing that had set the world on fire. More info can be found here. Judging by the reaction on the internet about this, one has to wonder if it might have been a big arcade hit. 😉
What are your thoughts on all this? I think it’s fascinating to see an arcade prototype out there as always – would be cool to see even more…
[Via Arcade Belgium]
