The Cutting Room Floor
The Cutting Room Floor is a site dedicated to unearthing and researching unused and cut content from video games. From debug menus, to unused music, graphics, enemies, or levels, many games have content never meant to be seen by anybody but the developers — or even meant for everybody, but cut due to time/budget constraints.
Feel free to browse our collection of games and start reading. Up for research? Try looking at some stubs and see if you can help us out. Just have some faint memory of some unused menu/level you saw years ago but can't remember how to access it? Feel free to start a page with what you saw and we'll take a look. If you want to help keep this site running and help further research into games, feel free to donate.
Featured Article
Developer: Manley & Associates
Publisher: Enix
Released: 1994, Super Nintendo
Much like how Squaresoft created Square USA to develop Secret of Evermore completely in America, Enix had a game of their own made in the states by developer Manley & Associates, then located in Seattle, Washington. A game based on King Arthur would make sense, since Americans are very familiar with the legend, but Enix took it one step further and based the game on a cartoon about football players who travel back in time to Camelot called King Arthur & the Knights of Justice.
The cartoon only lasted two seasons, and the game was met with much criticism. Not all of it was undeserved, though: it's notoriously glitchy, has an awkward password-based saving system, and uses some rather shallow and repetitive design, all of which suggest it was released in an unfinished state.
However, because so much was cut from the game for whatever reasons (budget and time constraints being most likely), it has turned out to be a real treasure trove of unused graphics, dialogue, items, and other content. Some elements (such as an unused cutscene) reveal how much more ambitious the project originally was, while others (mainly unused "fetch quest" items) were most likely removed to make the game less tedious than it already is.
While nobody (probably not even the developers) would argue that King Arthur & the Knights of Justice is a great game, it is an undeniably interesting little page in SNES history.
All Featured BlurbsWere You Aware...
- ...that 360: Three Sixty has its own entire source code hidden inside?
- ...that Chill has its own entire source code hidden inside?
- ...that there's an unused mask of Link's face in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask?
- ...that Mario has a model stretched to fit Luigi's proportions in Luigi's Mansion?
- ...that the difficulty of Stage 6 in Ghosts'n Goblins constantly changed between board revisions?
- ...that Streets of Rage 3 has two cut levels, both of them on otherwise unused motorcycles?
- ...that at least 70 games released on today's date have articles?
Contributing
Want to contribute? Not sure where to begin? Visit the Help page for everything you need to get started, including...
- Instructions for creating and editing articles
- Guides that will help you find debug modes, unused graphics, hidden levels, and more
- A list of what needs to be done
- Common things that can be found in hundreds of different games
We also have a sizable list of games that either don't have pages yet, or whose pages are in serious need of expansion. Check it out!
Featured File
Pokémon Red and Green is how it all began, with what started out as one man's passion project later becoming the incredibly loved and renowned franchise that Pokémon is today. As such, the development phase of these games has a certain mythical quality to it, with some of the fabled conceptual material still shrouded in mystery.
Various mock-ups were used to explain certain gameplay mechanics.
Here, a "Beast Tamer" (likely a precursor to the Tamer class, known in Japanese as "Wild Animal Tamer") with six "capsules" sends out "No. 23 Godzillante". Interestingly, the menu when facing the Tamer has the option はなす (talk) instead of the POKEMON menu option. The fight itself is then shown, depicting two creatures with strong likenesses to Godzilla and King Kong, even being known as Godzillante and Gorillaimo. These are but mere placeholder designs created solely to showcase the early battle mechanic, which is evidenced by their kaiju basis. Interestingly enough, Gorillaimo's hat could be a reference to Ninten, the main character of Ape Inc.'s Mother. The battle screen itself is rather rudimentary, with the Pokémon being seen from the side rather than being front and back, the PPs (here known as Tps, likely standing for "Technical Points", similar to TMs) being shown, and the total damage of the used move being stated (with here Gorillaimo receiving 300 damage after Gozillante "breathes fire" on it).
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