Welcome to The Cutting Room Floor. 3,773 articles and counting!

October 28, 2013 11:16 AM

Time-sink alert: 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.
posted by Artw (11 comments total)

Yesterday I was joking about it being Video Game Day, but wow, today's really Video Game Day.
posted by JHarris at 11:20 AM on October 28, 2013

Dear Valve Software,

In lieu of Half Life 3, we will be willing to accept any version of the existing HL2 franchise with the Vortex Hotwire Grenade enabled.

Sincerely,
Your fans.
posted by googly at 11:33 AM on October 28, 2013

HL1 appears to have some kind of cut sex-horse/amblipigid creature?
posted by Artw at 11:36 AM on October 28, 2013

Hmmm... Maybe that cut is for the best.
posted by Artw at 11:55 AM on October 28, 2013

God I fucking love that website.

If y'all enjoy this, you may also enjoy Unseen64, which seems to be down at the moment.
posted by griphus at 11:58 AM on October 28, 2013

I'm really surprised that so much of this stuff exists. I've never worked on a video game, but I would have expected the asset management / compilation systems to be better at automatically dropping all these unused bits and pieces. Particularly on consoles, where you have (or once had) such hard space limits.

Some of this stuff just seems really sloppy:

The original playable character before Gordon Freeman was fleshed out. He was nicknamed Ivan the Biker due to his wild looks. His model, "doctor.mdl", still exists in the game files but cannot be opened without repair, as it uses an earlier format. Various textures also exist.

Well, why is it still in there then? That sort of thing makes one wonder just how hacky and crude the whole endeavor must have been.

It makes for fun reading for me now, but somehow I don't think that's really one of the game-maker's goals.
posted by Western Infidels at 12:04 PM on October 28, 2013

Sometimes taking stuff out rather than simply hiding it can introduce bugs, which might explain some reluctance to do that.
posted by Artw at 12:07 PM on October 28, 2013

Asset management mostly consists of adding resources and making sure nothing is broken--curation is not as high of a priority when just getting the thing to work can be a chore.

In another career, I used to read a lot of time reading post-mortems on games in Gamasutra, and the tales of fighting the build tools would curl your hair.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 12:18 PM on October 28, 2013

I've never worked in game development but in it's not uncommon to turn off a feature of a product at the last minute but leave a lot of artifacts related to it in the release because of the risk of making big code changes without enough time to test.
posted by octothorpe at 12:56 PM on October 28, 2013

I don't even know where to start.
posted by gucci mane at 4:55 PM on October 28, 2013

The copy protection in Earthbound is the most hilarious thing I've learned in awhile.
posted by weewooweewoo at 5:23 PM on October 28, 2013 [2 favorites]