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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.
Did 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 many of the special items in Landstalker were censored from the Japanese version?
- ...that Sonic the Hedgehog Mobile has graphics for the Marble Zone UFOs seen in a prototype of the Genesis original?
- ...that Mortal Kombat II and Mortal Kombat 3 have fake character names that were deliberately put in to fool people poking around in the code?
- ...that Maya the Bee & Her Friends was supposed to be a South Park game?
Featured Article
Super Mario Galaxy
Developer: Nintendo EAD
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: 2007, Wii
Super Mario Galaxy takes traditional platforming and sets it deep in space in one of the best video games of all time. Left over in the game are traces of all the ideas that didn't quite make it into the game, from lost planets to unused enemies to early models. A few of these ideas were worked into the sequel.
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.
