Hidden Palace has released an unbelievably good collection to the public – the PS2 (which is still the most successful console of all time with its 155 or so million sales; not even the PlayStation 4 could top it so far!) now has many of its games available in a pre-release format.

In game development, it’s natural to have a game presented to the public (or the media) in a pre-release, prototype build at say, E3. Now, Hidden Palace has released a part of history from the 2000s. How about an E3 2005 demo build of Shadow of the Colossus? What about an E3 2001 prototype of Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex? Would you like to see an early build of God of War II? The archival team has the answers for you!

You can see these games in action at a stream here. You can play these games on PC with the help of an emulator, or if you are a bit more tech-savvy, on a real PS2 (all we have to say is FreeMcBoot…). More than 860 GB of data is available, coming from multiple sources, and the team spent almost a year looking through the differences between the games’ respective retail and pre-release versions.

„These ageing items were miraculously rescued from being destroyed, thrown away, or sold through the herculean efforts of one person. This person not only took on the task of backing up everything in their possession single-handedly but was so overwhelmingly kind enough to let us look at and preserve each item in his collection with no strings attached. Yes, that’s right, all of it. For nothing in return.

Just to name a few, we have an E3 prototype of Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex as well as an E3 prototype of Shadow of the Colossus, both based on really early versions of the game. We have pre-Japanese prototypes such as God Hand and Dino Stalker, both also include cool debugging tools! We also have many other builds that contain active debuggers like Dragon’s Lair 3D, Final Fantasy X-2, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2, plus many many many more,” Hidden Palace wrote.

Thank you. Get the emulators ready – these are memories from the past that weren’t meant to be shown to us, but now, we can experience them, too.

Source: PSL