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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.
Didst thou wot...
- ...that Spiker! Super Pro Volleyball has a birth announcement hidden in the code?
- ...that Mario Paint has hidden features that are disabled by default?
- ...that even games from 1975 can have unused graphics?
- ...that there are voice clips in Super Smash Bros. for six characters' Final Smashes?
- ...that the Game Boy Color version of Dragon Warrior III has Dragon Warrior IV-related content in it?
- ...that Somari was once just called Mario?
Featured Article
King Arthur & the Knights of Justice
Developer: Manley & Associates
Publisher: Enix
Released: 1994, Super Nintendo
Much like how Squaresoft created Square USA to develop Secret of Evermore completely in America, Enix had a game of their own made in the states by developer Manley & Associates, then located in Seattle, Washington. A game based on King Arthur would make sense, since Americans are very familiar with the legend, but Enix took it one step further and based the game on a cartoon about football players who travel back in time to Camelot called King Arthur & the Knights of Justice.
The cartoon only lasted two seasons, and the game was met with much criticism. Not all of it was undeserved, though: it's notoriously glitchy, has an awkward password-based saving system, and uses some rather shallow and repetitive design, all of which suggest it was released in an unfinished state.
However, because so much was cut from the game for whatever reasons (budget and time constraints being most likely), it has turned out to be a real treasure trove of unused graphics, dialogue, items, and other content. Some elements (such as an unused cutscene) reveal how much more ambitious the project originally was, while others (mainly unused "fetch quest" items) were most likely removed to make the game less tedious than it already is.
While nobody (probably not even the developers) would argue that King Arthur & the Knights of Justice is a great game, it is an undeniably interesting little page in SNES history.
Contributing
Itching to discover some buried treasure yourself? Not sure where to start? Check out our ever-growing Guides section for lots of helpful information on finding debug modes, unused graphics, hidden levels, and more.
Even if you aren't skilled with research, you can still help! Some things that need to be done:
- Expanding and adding information to short pages.
- Writing some guidelines and style pages, both for reference and to have a consistent style.
- Adding pages for developer tools and features — debug modes, level select menus, etc. — as well as unused graphics, text, music, levels, items and prototypes.
- This also includes pages for tools like the Game Genie, GameShark, Hex editors, as well as other tools.
- If you can do research, take a stab at some stuff listed on Content to expand.
When in doubt, remember this excellent tip from Link's Awakening:
Here is your clue. Make all the red blue.
