Here’s an exciting little piece of Sega history that’s recently come to light! Former Sega Technical Institute programmer Ken Rose kept a collection of floppy disks from his time at the studio in the early 1990s, and thanks to the preservation efforts of Hidden Palace and DevStash, their contents have now been recovered and documented.

Among the discoveries are prototypes, original source code and development documents from six projects, including Treasure Tails, a cancelled isometric puzzle adventure starring Sonic’s sidekick, as well as Jester, B-Bomb, Dark Empires and Segapede. There’s even an early build of Kid Chameleon. Some of these games were never released, while others survive in playable forms.

What I love most is how much of the development history has survived alongside the games themselves, including the reasons certain projects were cancelled and the people who worked on them. It’s amazing that we’re still uncovering new pieces of Mega Drive history more than thirty years later. I’ve included some of the recovered artwork and prototype screenshots in the article, along with links to Hidden Palace’s original preservation work.

As ever, who knows if this is even worth mentioning, this is just the daily little article for my NeoCities experiment :)