Group of Gamers Publishes 752 Unreleased PS2 Demos and Prototypes

An archiving group has published over 700 prototypes and demos of PlayStation 2 games. The first part of Project Deluge contains 752 such games, which were never officially released. The games come from a single collector.

Project Deluge is published by conservation group Hidden Palace, also writes Video Game Chronicle. The drop includes previews of Rachet & Clank, God of War, Final Fantasy X-2, Spyro: A Hero’s Tail, and Kingdom Hearts. The project also includes E3 demos of Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex, God of War 2, and Shadow of the Colossus. A full list of all published PS2 prototypes is available on the Hidden Palace website.

The 752 demos comprise only the first part of Project Deluge. According to Hidden Palace, it is “an ongoing project to preserve a massive batch of various game prototypes, pre-production assets, and archive footage from multiple console generations.” These old games all come from an anonymous collector, who “independently saved the games from destruction, discarding or sale.” This collector has made backups of his own collection, which in total is good for about 860GB of data. The collection was then made available to Hidden Palace free of charge, so that these demos can all be preserved.

Hidden Palace has said it has partnered with the Internet Archive to review the various games. Internet Archive also hosts all demos, which can be downloaded and played by anyone. Hidden Palace held a livestream on Twitch last weekend, during which the group played demos from Project Deluge for six hours. According to the community, more games will be added to Project Deluge, but it is not yet known when this will happen.

Gameplay of a Spyro: A Hero’s Tail prototype from Project Deluge