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Originally Posted by dosraider
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Haha, I like it how the page at Romero's website also offers an option to downgrade
Doom back to v1.1 to get some stuff that was cut
In fact, quite a few alphas and betas of various games were leaked - I guess the temptation is huge in every case
- but they're all in the grey area from the legal standpoint. I think many companies just don't realise that officially releasing beta stuff from their games would actually help increase those games' popularity and gain additional favour from their fans.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DarthHelmet86
Sadly a lot of it is just lost to time and people of that time (and now) not caring about the betas and unfinished parts they didn't need anymore. Even this is a huge pile of change if he did manage to get a copy.
Just as a note of a collector of things, if I had the only copy of something and it was in digital medium, something that can become corrupted or destroyed by shear accident (hard drive failure or a virus could wipe it from his HDD, scratches could break a CD) I would want to make as many copies as I could so that it truly never be lost. Oh well it would be great if it one day did come out, maybe fans could even clean it up and make it a full game. Oddly with the amount of people interested in it I am surprised Blizzard hasn't tried to get it fully made and make some money off it. The lack of quality wouldn't stop fans from just wanting it and the big canon differences could easily be ignored by just marking it is as non canon.
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I agree. It is highly possible that people did not archive pre-release/WIP materials in the first place because it had not occurred to them that all of it could be of (historical) interest later. This is understandable to a degree because the main goal of game development is to finish the game, and other priorities are secondary. Also, various copyright issues may come into play, the fear that "rival companies will steal or ideas!" in some cases is a factor as well, and there's also the mere fact that game development often involves many people, and coordinating their efforts in creating the main game might be sometimes a problem already, to say nothing of all the by-product or rejected materials. Sadly, not all people who are in game development have the nice habit of archiving whatever they can. And, faulty media are a problem too - this discussion here just reminded me of
another one about the PlayStation version of Duke Nukem 3D which includes an extra episode. Apparently, that episode was first developed on the PC platform and then ported to PlayStation with the rest of the game's levels. The community was able to contact one of the developers but it turned out that the original files were stored on ZIP disks that are either lost or have already deteriorated (or both).