Last night, the video game conservation group, The Hidden Palace, released over 700 early PS2 versions, prototypes, E3 and press release demos in a massive repository, the group called “Project Deluge”.
The Hidden Palace hosted a stream on Twitch that lasted over six hours on Saturday night. During that stream, they presented a number of PS2 pre-release versions 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 versions were only seen at fairs, such as E3, and were built specifically to cover previews. Other early versions include debugging and beta development versions. All this was found and saved from being sold or thrown away by a single person who worked with The Hidden Palace and the Internet Archive to properly catalog and upload all of these files. In total, this adds over 850 GB of data.
It’s a treasure trove of video game history that The Hidden Palace has spent almost a year digging, sorting out retail constructions and saving only new prototypes and revisions. You can read more wonderful details about how the team managed to achieve this a blog post on the group’s website. Short answer: It seems like a lot of work. A lot of work.
And surprisingly, Project Deluge is not over. The team claims that it has several prototypes to explode and plans to launch them soon, but it does not have a more precise date than that.
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