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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
Half-Life 2 prototype
Developer: Valve
Publisher: Valve
Released: N/A (Unreleased prototype), Windows
The Half-Life 2 prototype is a prototype of Half-Life 2 that was leaked in Fall 2003, less than a year before Half-Life 2 was released but a few days after the game missed its initial release date. Thanks to poor security on Valve's end, a hacker was able to remotely enter their hard drives and steal development data. While Valve eventually cut the connection, someone who knew the hacker got ahold of the prototype before the hacker was arrested. With the prototype's release, Half-Life fans learned that Valve was nowhere close to being done, despite it being leaked a few days after the game was supposed to be released. Oops.
The prototype not only contains resources of what would become the final game, it also contains many resources from earlier revisions such as scrapped weapons, level textures that are different in style from the ones used in the final game, removed props, characters that never appeared in the final game, and early textures for characters that did appear. It's not just a prototype; it's also something of an archive of the game's development.
Did You Know...
- ...that Matt Furniss will break your legs if you hack Mad Professor Mariarti?
- ...that Mechanized Attack has an actual, factual nude code?
- ...that Side B of the Apple II Karateka diskette has an upside-down version of the game?
- ...that Journey to Silius started out as a Terminator game?
- ...that the A-Type song in the Game Boy version of Tetris was completely different in the earliest released copies?
- ...that the Game Boy version of Qix was meant to have more endings?
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!
