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: Square
Publisher: Square
Released: 1997, PlayStation
Final Fantasy Tactics was, for many people, their first strategy RPG ever. Featuring an engaging story, excellent graphics and music, and an incredibly intricate gameplay system, this game is a classic all around. It has quite a bit in common with Tactics Ogre, an earlier strategy RPG, mainly because the two games were developed by the same teams.
And, of course, it has its fair share of unused content. With unused battle maps, overpowered debug command sets, extra playable characters, fully intact NPC and enemy data left hidden from view, and a whole mess of music left orphaned in the west with the removal of some minigames, Final Fantasy Tactics was pretty much the reason to own a GameShark back in the late 1990s.
All Featured BlurbsDid You Know...
- ...that Gremlins: Unleashed and Kirikou have a variety of hidden images and messages from the developers, including rants about crappy Windows dev environments?
- ...that the Amiga version of Dragon's Lair has a message to crackers, asking them to wait a while before cracking the game...and it worked?
- ...that Bloody Roar 4 has the entire RenderWare 3.7 SDK hidden inside?
- ...that a Dreamcast port of Half-Life was finished but not released?
- ...that PuLiRuLa has a hidden snowy stage in the game's code?
- ...that Valve accidentally leaked cut weapon names in Team Fortress 2 then leaked the assets for said weapons almost two years later to the day?
- ...that at least 13 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
1998's Half-Life introduced the Black Mesa physicist Gordan Freeman, however his design was not always what was released in the final game.
Gordon Freeman's model is completely different in the September 1997 prototype. The prototype has a much bulkier HEV design with a dark yellow color instead of the final's, large gloves, and the word "Research" on his back. Gordon himself has a large beard and a flat top haircut. He has a Pistol glued to his right hand.
This version of Gordon Freeman was given the name "Ivan the Space Biker" by Valve.
Inside the prototype's model folder are models for a blue Gordon, a green Gordon, and a red Gordon. These models are possibly for multiplayer team modes. If so, the prototype does not have a yellow model for Gordon (game modes with four teams would usually have red, blue, green, and yellow teams, as seen in popular Quake mods). However, considering the dark yellow color the regular Gordon model has, it could be that the regular model would've been used for players on the yellow team. These colored models use an older model version than the version the majority of the prototype's models use.
This design appears in several early pre-release images, including one of the first images ever released by Valve.
Interestingly, this model was added to the model files in the Steam version of Half-Life for some reason. This model appears to be using the same model version the rest of the prototype's models use instead of the model format the final's models use, which made it impossible to view in a model viewer for a very long time. It also appears in Half-Life: Source's files, this time compiled for the same model version the rest of Source's models use.
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