Here’s an exciting little piece of Sega history that’s recently come to light! Former Sega Technical Institute programmer Ken Rose kept a collection of floppy disks from his time at the studio in the early 1990s, and thanks to the preservation efforts of Hidden Palace and DevStash, their contents have now been recovered and documented.
Among the discoveries are prototypes, original source code and development documents from six projects, including Treasure Tails, a cancelled isometric puzzle adventure starring Sonic’s sidekick, as well as Jester, B-Bomb, Dark Empires and Segapede. There’s even an early build of Kid Chameleon. Some of these games were never released, while others survive in playable forms.
What I love most is how much of the development history has survived alongside the games themselves, including the reasons certain projects were cancelled and the people who worked on them. It’s amazing that we’re still uncovering new pieces of Mega Drive history more than thirty years later. I’ve included some of the recovered artwork and prototype screenshots in the article, along with links to Hidden Palace’s original preservation work.
As ever, who knows if this is even worth mentioning, this is just the daily little article for my NeoCities experiment :)
Yo! I would absolutely LOVE to see someone handcraftingly go through the stuff for Treasure Tails and build a form of it!
I might even be somewhat interested in learning how to code for whichever system this was on just to do it even… presuming I don’t give up quickly.
Floppies sitting in a drawer for 30 years and still readable is the real miracle here. Hidden Palace and DevStash keep doing the work that stops game history from just vanishing.
The source code and design docs matter more than the ROM here. A prototype binary only shows what the game did, while the code shows how the Treasure Tails isometric engine was built on the Mega Drive. Does anyone know if Hidden Palace and DevStash plan to release the code itself, or just the documentation of it?
Blows my mind thinking how much stuff just gets lost to history but I’ve worked for companies that were purchased and when everyone left, stuff would just get cleared out by liquidators. Even if we were allowed to grab what we wanted almost nobody bothered.
And, software devs, THIS is why you keep a copy of the code and documentation when you leave.
Not because you might want to use it for malicious reasons. That can backfire.
But, one, your local copy will always be there for your reference, so you can recall a funky solution, or a weird bug and it’s workarounds.
But most importantly… who knows if in 30-50 years that code won’t become something highly sought after?
With the way gamedev works these days, that would be entirely against the NDAs you sign with the company and open you up to legal and financial repercussions on top of essentially making you unemployable by any other game company out there. Doesn’t matter if you leave the company, the NDAs still survive. I completely get where you are coming from and why you are saying that, but it’s just not a good idea in today’s day and age, sadly.
That’s why I said SAVE the code, not USE it.
in 20-30 years that company will be dust. Or at best, trying to get that code back. In which case you can swoop in and deliver a saviour package - “hey guys I worked here some 30 years ago and kiiiiinda didn’t delete the code when I left, now I know it’s against my contract, but rest assured it was only used for archival purposes - anyway heard you wanted backups because you lost yours, so here it is”
Unfortunately “archival purposes” doesn’t save you at all here. Any act of taking anything out of the office, physical or not, would get caught right now and get you prosecuted.
“right now” - interesting, it hasn’t happened to me yet.
Also interestingly, worked at “high security” places where IT literally was unaware that a middle manager used their work laptop to torrent bestiality porn - they only saw it once the police raided the manager and confiscated their work laptop and IT had to check wtf was going on.
Monitoring is rarely as thorough as your IT dept would have you believe.
