- Pronouns
- He/They
IMPORTANT NOTICE: it is extremely unlikely that Tim will release any of the builds he's been showing, please do not pester him about this.
dated November 21st 1996 and featuring the infamous Captain Blackeye, who made a few cameos in it's finalized form of the Banjo-Kazooie series. he also previously shared some footage from a Twelve Tales cartridge, but Rare has previously released high quality footage of that officially. (the same series also featured footage from Project Dream, but this appears to be a later build. as Blackeye wasn't shown there.)
as for Kevin Bayliss, he only shown his cart. but i'd imagine he'll get some images out there soon.
now to get into more detail on why a public dump won't happen....
Microsoft has had a noted history of blocking official releases of prototypes.
Rare Replay was originally meant to include playable versions of 3 of the cancelled 360-era projects, as well as a "handheld" Battletoads game that could have been either the rediscovered game boy port of the arcade game found during development of RR, or the GBA reboot. but issues with "cauterising the rough edges and cordoning off a playable experience" caused them to be dropped.
Double Fine used to share protos created during their internal "Amnesia Fortnight" game jams, including early builds of what would later become Costume Quest and Once Upon a Monster. but the Microsoft acquitstion caused them to start solely providing video footage.
and the Halo development team at 343 is trying to share the famous Halo 2 E3 2003 demo level. but it's going through the painstaking process of Microsoft making them manually port the whole thing to the final version's engine and fixing bugs rather than just providing the original files as-is.
sharing it without Microsoft's permission has it's own legal issues, Andrew Borman (another archivist who i've worked with occasionally) had to deal with their lawyers after acquiring and dumping late prototypes of Conker's Bad Fur Day and Perfect Dark back in 2013. he miraculously managed to survive just by removing all links to the builds on his site. (by which point it was thankfully already mirrored several times)
to be clear, dumping it privately will be fine. The Video Game History Foundation is already trying to get in contact with him for this. and Rare's own archives already have a few copies of it and other titles (note how the footage they provided appears to be running on an emulator).
the only obstacle awaiting them is that the later Rare protos like Twelve Tales require a security dongle to run, but it's already been reverse-engineered thanks to those aforementioned 2013 releases.
dated November 21st 1996 and featuring the infamous Captain Blackeye, who made a few cameos in it's finalized form of the Banjo-Kazooie series. he also previously shared some footage from a Twelve Tales cartridge, but Rare has previously released high quality footage of that officially. (the same series also featured footage from Project Dream, but this appears to be a later build. as Blackeye wasn't shown there.)
as for Kevin Bayliss, he only shown his cart. but i'd imagine he'll get some images out there soon.
now to get into more detail on why a public dump won't happen....
Microsoft has had a noted history of blocking official releases of prototypes.
Rare Replay was originally meant to include playable versions of 3 of the cancelled 360-era projects, as well as a "handheld" Battletoads game that could have been either the rediscovered game boy port of the arcade game found during development of RR, or the GBA reboot. but issues with "cauterising the rough edges and cordoning off a playable experience" caused them to be dropped.
Double Fine used to share protos created during their internal "Amnesia Fortnight" game jams, including early builds of what would later become Costume Quest and Once Upon a Monster. but the Microsoft acquitstion caused them to start solely providing video footage.
and the Halo development team at 343 is trying to share the famous Halo 2 E3 2003 demo level. but it's going through the painstaking process of Microsoft making them manually port the whole thing to the final version's engine and fixing bugs rather than just providing the original files as-is.
sharing it without Microsoft's permission has it's own legal issues, Andrew Borman (another archivist who i've worked with occasionally) had to deal with their lawyers after acquiring and dumping late prototypes of Conker's Bad Fur Day and Perfect Dark back in 2013. he miraculously managed to survive just by removing all links to the builds on his site. (by which point it was thankfully already mirrored several times)
to be clear, dumping it privately will be fine. The Video Game History Foundation is already trying to get in contact with him for this. and Rare's own archives already have a few copies of it and other titles (note how the footage they provided appears to be running on an emulator).
the only obstacle awaiting them is that the later Rare protos like Twelve Tales require a security dongle to run, but it's already been reverse-engineered thanks to those aforementioned 2013 releases.
(from the release notes for the BFD proto.)
