What "Lost Media" are you interested in?

I want to see the original unedited version of the 1986 Fist of the North Star movie. It's been told that the original theatrical release was fully uncensored, and all home video releases following, except (partially) one Italian VHS, were censored using rainbow blurring and other artifacting. The trailer contains a a short clip of a scene that was censored in the movie, but not in that specific trailer, which makes me wonder. Some believe the original reels were lost in a fire, others say it was always censored even in the theaters, but I think only Toei knows the answer and they're not about to tell anything. A friend and I have been dying for some closure on this situation for years now.

Dave Chappelle's lost episodes.

I adore looking into cancelled or lost games, I have deep fascination with beta/alpha games and seeing what was and what was not to be, I find things like that amazing.

There was this one South Park game that was lost until somebody found it on a random Xbox Developer Kit they got their hands on:

(Only in depth video I can find).

I desperately want to get hold of lost builds and the like, that's probably why I hate Pitchford for refusing to let the Duke Nukem Forever builds be released... Hopefully one day we "find" a "lost" thumbstick with it on at a convention, hopefully not filled with risque videos this time eh Randy? ^{you dick}

One I'm particularly interested in is They Hunger: Lost Souls, allegedly there was a later build of it around in 2009 before it got canned and I'd like to see it (I have the 2006 and 2008 builds).

15 hours ago, Wadmodder RiderPùdu said:

In gaming, there was also the infamous Forge town planned for Heroes of Might & Magic III first expansion pack Armageddon's Blade. This is mostly cut content, but pretty interesting nonetheless.

 

Here's a link to information we know about this scrapped faction:

http://www.heroesofmightandmagic.com/heroes3ab/forgetown.shtml

 

Ment to be a futuristic faction, it would had been likely derived from the Heavenly Forge plot point (the Evil ending) from Might & Magic VII. However, while the Forge was almost completed, fans negatively reacted to the inclusion, and 3DO and New World Computing even recieved death threats. In response, they removed the Forge in favor of the Conflux faction, the latter initially planned for a second expansion pack (which evolution into Shadow of Death).

 

Some fans of Might & Magic and Heroes of Might & Magic even speculate that this was one of the downfalls of both 3DO and New World Computing that resulted in their bankruptcy in 2003 and the Ubisoft acquisition of the Might & Magic franchise.

 

Neither expansion pack (or even the Heroes Chronicles series, a HOMM spin-off that uses the same engine as HOMM III) has their source code preserved and were not included in Ubisoft's 2015 HD Edition, so only the HD+ mod is the proper & definitive experience you'll ever get to playing the game on a modern system.

 

There had been mods for HOMM III to recreate the Forge, but many of them require VCMI, In the Wake of Gods (With ERA II) or just replacing the faction town graphics. So these restorations are not as good as some of the 3DO & New World Computing designs that have been floating around the internet for year.

 

Otherwise, any prototypes of Heroes of Might & Magic III and its expansion packs are unlikely to resurface.

Yes. Would have loved to see Forge.

16 hours ago, P41R47 said:

Oh, i remember that. Valleys of Neptune was a big disappointment to me. I expected something like ''First Rays of the New Rising Sun'' that has almost all the material for the intended fourth album but with the line up of Band of Gypsyes, but we got just a few unreleased songs, and some never released different takes of old songs.
New Jimi songs are becoming the new ''song n°30 by Robert Johnson''.

Yeah I hear ya, but I would still like to check it out. ;) At this point in time, the frackin tape will probably turn to dust and if it did I would be the first to have to laugh. haha.

14 hours ago, unerxai said:

I'd love to see the original Star Wars that was shown on theaters in 1977.

I saw it back in 77 and it was awesome. :D

12 hours ago, Jello said:

120 Days of Sodom is fucked up, to put it mildly. The fleshed out parts are pretty run of the mill sexual fetishes up to day thirty, with some Coprophilia thrown in. But he never finished the last 90 days, they're basically just notes on what he wanted to explore when he wrote it. And it gets heavily into rape, dismemberment, and necrophilia. That's why I'm not sure if it's a good or bad thing that he never finished it. But still, it's a work of literature, so the world deserves to judge it on it's own merits. I'm just amazed that I got to sit in study hall when I was a senior and read it. But I brought it from home.

Yeah, i know the atrocities it depict. I watched Salo, so i got an idea of what i will read.

Seems you had a bad time with it. Unfortunate that tou had to read it for studies.

I'm making studies for my own amusement on different satirist of the past.

And the Marquis is surely one that stood over with his perversities, that were most of the time, an extreme exageration of what the burgoise and nobility made. He took what Voltaire left on Candide and take it even further.

Its an interesting figure, and his choice to be the embodiment of all that was bad on the society, and then reflect it as mirror of all the so called "good people" of his time, was an extreme no other ever tried.

He become a satire of what he was satirizing.

I wanna watch some cartoons that were based on Rambo or Conan The Barbarian.

Gran Turismo 2 was my childhood, but it wasn't until some years after playing it for the first time that I found out there was a ton of cut content that was, in some cases, even documented in prerelease pictures. For some reason I find cut/hidden stuff from old videogames fascinating, especially when the only sources are old photos.

Like this CLK-GTR that was at some point fully functional, but got removed from the game completely:

Then it got probably replaced by yet another CLK car, but this time a generic DTM mercedes that is only available thru cheats:

 

Or Special Stage Route 11, one of the tracks from GT1 that never made it into the second game:


There's also cars that don't even have a body ingame, as just the logos remain in the files. 

Which would have been this:

Maybe if the game hadn't been rushed for 1999 some of this content would still be in the game. But hey, it's over 20 years old at this point, so it's quite easy to get over it :P

The lost screenplay of the unproduced Glamorama film adaptation.

Also the pilot for the cancelled Less Than Zero hulu webseries.

Just Lost Media in general. In love it, from time to time I still check the Lost Media Archives. Don't really have a favorite type of it, though... Maybe websites and video games?

If promised doom wad doesn't get released, but has screenshots otherwise, does it turn into lost media too? 

10 hours ago, Taw Tu'lki said:

I wanna watch some cartoons that were based on Rambo or Conan The Barbarian.

There were, but they're kids' cartoons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambo:_The_Force_of_Freedom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Adventurer_(1992_TV_series)

I remember Conan's sidekick was a jerkass phoenix that hid on his shield, and his sword was made of a special metal that the big bad guy was trying to get.

13 hours ago, P41R47 said:

Yeah, i know the atrocities it depict. I watched Salo, so i got an idea of what i will read.

Seems you had a bad time with it. Unfortunate that tou had to read it for studies.

I'm making studies for my own amusement on different satirist of the past.

And the Marquis is surely one that stood over with his perversities, that were most of the time, an extreme exageration of what the burgoise and nobility made. He took what Voltaire left on Candide and take it even further.

Its an interesting figure, and his choice to be the embodiment of all that was bad on the society, and then reflect it as mirror of all the so called "good people" of his time, was an extreme no other ever tried.

He become a satire of what he was satirizing.

Don't get me wrong, it was an interesting read. Just wanted to make sure you were ready for it, and it sounds like you are. When I related the book to my older brother, he seemed to be really bothered by it. I wasn't really bothered, but Sade does take things to extremes. Although honestly, with the direction even cable TV has taken in the last 15 to 20 years, nothing would really be shocking anymore. I read it back in 2004, and times have changed quite a bit since then.

And it wasn't part of any curriculum, I just wanted to read it. I just felt kind of odd reading it at school. Having to put my backpack on the desk in front of me, I don't think the teacher would've appreciated the naked lady on the cover. Or the big bold "The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings" on the cover.

On 7/14/2020 at 1:38 AM, Marn said:

The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

Not gonna lie, when I clicked on the link and the page was loading, I thought to myself that I was getting rickrolled...

Also, speaking of Mortal Kombat, there isn't even any production material of the cancelled third film, (and sequel to the infamous second film, Annihilation) Mortal Kombat: Devastation even floating around anywhere on the internet, other than mentions on some Mortal Kombat fan sites and the Mortal Kombat Fandom Wiki.

Also, regarding Federation of Martial Arts, there are two episodes of that short lived web series that haven't been archived whatsoever, they are Episode 18 (Nightwolf vs. Scorpion - Round 3) and Episode 45 (Quan Chi vs. Rain - Round 3). Finding these missing episodes is not going to be easy, as Internet Archive & the Wayback Machine doesn't have everything related to Threshold Entertainment's Mortal Kombat webpages. Unless somebody around 2000 to 2001 had downloaded all the episodes from the Threshold Entertainment's Mortal Kombat website (which few people ever had downloaded a video in the days of dial-up before broadband was the de facto norm), these two missing episodes are unlikely to resurface.

MKSecrets' The History of Mortal Kombat episode 7 (both the Original Audio & Remastered Audio versions) even featured footage from the web series as well as it's official webpage (Original Audio timestamp of FOMA is at 13:35, Remastered Audio timestamp is at 13:31).

So maybe it was possible to download & archive these episodes of this forgotten Mortal Kombat web series in the early 2000s, but few people and even Mortal Kombat fans ever did that (way before YouTube, online television & movie piracy, as well as illegal internet video streaming was a thing).

So, overall the archival process of Mortal Kombat: FOMA is almost complete, missing only two episodes.

Heck, nobody has even tried to remaster Mortal Kombat Federation of Martial Arts with similar methods used by Harmy (Creator of the Despecialized Editions of Star Wars to recreate the original theatrical versions of Episodes IV, V & VI), since the forgotten web series never got a home video release (At least not officially).

So in terms of a fan restoration of MK:FOMA, can anybody identify the green screen backgrounds used in each episode aside from the Nightwolf and Scorpion fight which was filmed somewhere in the world (and the only fight that wasn't filmed in a green screen)?

Fan restoring these episodes (including the two missing episodes) is not going to be easy, as they only exist in low quality, unless somebody who previously worked at Threshold Entertainment has higher quality versions of the episodes (as it's unlikely that Threshold Entertainment still has the original master tapes in their archives).

Probably the first ever animated movie, made by an argentinian, "El apostol", it got turned into a hairbrush, so i think it's completely lost.

The same guy also made a movie called "Peludopolis", wich is also lost, and i think it also turned into a hairbrush.

Silent Hill 2 and 3. Apparently the source code and resources were lost or not archived properly, which is why the hd collection was so bad and it took them as long to make the port as it took to make the games originally. But at least the original games still exist, so not all is lost.

Now that you mention lost source code... definitely having Daggerfall's code would be awesome.

In regards to real incidents, the audio of the first video of the Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion/TV hijacking incident that took place on WGN on November 22 1987.

Heck, I even did a debunking video on both Max Headroom incident videos using the same footage, since you can find the original WGN & WTTW Max Headroom incident videos.

There's also a third incident video made by NORCAM floating around the internet, but dare I say to you, it isn't even good. Many people debunked the heck out of it, because it's just footage from the second incident video (flipped horizontally and reversed), the buzzing noise from the first incident video (actually the audio from Jonrev's first incident recreation video), and dubbed audio from one of NORCAM's voice actors. So therefore, that video is fake. Therefore, a blatant "Mock-Edit". Here it is: 

I know about a few lesser known television broadcast hijackings like the Vrillion and Captain Midnight incidents, but the former only exists in the form of recreations, while the latter exists from off-air recordings from people watching HBO on April 27, 1986.

Here's another type of lost media that I'm personally quite interested in: press kits of 90s PC games. It is beyond doubt that video game companies sent their promo materials like screenshots and art to game magazines in original lossless quality, because some of the mags included these images on coverdisks (but sadly, only a fraction of the actual materials was preserved that way). However the vast majority of the stuff that we have now is in degraded quality thanks to either JPEG compression or conversion to GIF with dithering.

For example, a lot of pre-release StarCraft screenshots from different development phases exist, but only a handful are in any kind of lossless format, and even less come in original quality (e.g. with the original 8-bit palette).

As I mentioned above, thankfully at least some images were preserved via magazine coverdisks. This is also not perfect because some of magazines would also convert the images to some other format (but usually not JPEG), or paste the magazine logo over each screenshot (grr). In some cases, original quality images can be found on official websites preserved by the Wayback Machine, or, even less often, on fansites. The most amazing find of this kind that I know of is an almost complete set of early MechWarrior II VGA screenshots in original quality preserved by one such site -- everywhere else the same images had the palette entirely screwed up. Thankfully, at least MobyGames allows to preserve such media in the Promo Art section.

There is even very few unreleased software in very rare occasions. A few I can think of are mostly from Apple or Microsoft.

A few examples of unreleased Microsoft software (Other than video games) are as follows:

- WinFS: was being developed during the pre-reset builds of Windows Vista (then known as codename Longhorn), was scrapped during the development of Windows Vista's post-reset builds.

- Windows Codename Cairo: was to be a software project for Windows NT with a revamped core OS & new features. Only two build are confirmed to exist, as the project was ultimately never released, but similar features would be released in future Windows releases.

- Windows Codename Nashville (AKA Windows 96): was meant to be a successor to Windows 95 with better internet integration. Only a single build of Nashville OS (Build 999) was released before the OS portion was scrapped in favor of Internet Explorer 4 & Codename Memphis (Later released as Windows 98)

- Windows Codename Neptune, Triton & Odyssey: Neptune was supposed to be the first consumer version of the Windows NT kernel based on Windows 2000 with Triton meant to be a minor update to Neptune, while Odyssey was to be the next business version of Windows NT, but these projects were ultimately scrapped and the development team of each codename were merged to make Codename Whistler which later became Windows XP. Only a single build of Neptune (Build 5111.1) has been leaked, while no official builds of Odyssey & Triton have ever surfaced as neither ever left the planning board.

- Windows Codename Longhorn & Blackcomb: Both being developed at the same time during Windows XP's consumer availability. Longhorn was supposed to be a interim release, while Blackcomb was supposed to be a major release. Both projects were ambitious, with few Microsoft developers not knowing what was the ground-breaking feature of both OS projects. This, combined with the lack of stabilization & quality assurance of the pre-reset builds of Longhorn, prompted the reset of Longhorn development in 2004, while Blackcomb would be mysteriously scrapped and/or be allegedly renamed to codename Vienna. Many of the features planned for both OS codenames were scrapped from both Windows Vista & Windows 7.

- DirectX version 4: was to be a shorter term release of DirectX, but was ultimately never released due to lack of development interest from Microsoft's DirectX team.

- Codename Fahrenheit: was an attempt to unify Direct3D & OpenGL by Microsoft & SGI, but was also ultimately never released due to lack of development interest from both Microsoft & SGI developers.

- Codename Talisman: was to be a new 3D graphics API based on quickly compositing 2D "sub-images onto the screen. Development cancelled in the late 1990s.

- Chrome Effects: a web browser plugin planned to play 3D graphics & video through a web browser. Development was cancelled in November 1998 due to lack of OEM interest. (Not to be confused with Techland's Chrome Engine, Google Chrome, the Chromium browser, or the current Chromium branch of Microsoft Edge)

- Windows Ultimate Extras - Unreleased Extras: a very short lived set of extras for Windows Vista Ultimate users with only eight officially released extras. An extra eight more were planned to be released, but these extras were ultimately never released, never came into fruition or were cancelled during development of the other extras and/or Windows 7. I have a Lost Media Wiki forum post of the unreleased extras. Here it is: https://forums.lostmediawiki.com/thread/4893/windows-ultimate-extras-unreleased

There maybe other unreleased codenames & projects from Microsoft but information on these are pretty scarce.

A few unreleased Apple products are as follows:

- Apple Paladin (Project X): was to be this combination of a computer, fax machine, scanner, & phone running on it's own software called Complete Office. Ultimately never released and only a few prototype exist.

- Apple Walt: was to be a combined fax machine & telephone. Announced in 1993 at the Boston Macworld Expo, it was ultimately never released, but a working prototype surfaced last year.

- Apple Interactive Television Box: was to be an interactive television platform in the 1990s. Apparently based on the Macintosh Quadra 605 or LC 475 as other hardware related specs are pretty scarce, so it was likely to be based on "Classic" Mac OS (Version 7.1.1 to be exact). Never officially released & only a few prototypes have ever been found. Apple later released their first TV Media Player "Apple TV" in 2007, which is still produced as of today.

- Apple PenLight: likely supposed to be a mix of a Macintosh PowerBook & a Tablet. Was developed alongside the Newton, but was to be powered by "Classic" Mac OS. Ultimately never released & only a few prototypes exist.

- Apple Star Trek project: A project started by Apple & Novell to port Mac OS 7 & it's applications to Intel processors (predating the 2005-2006 PowerPC to Intel Transition for Mac computers) announced in February 1992. Ultimately cancelled in 1993 but similar concepts would make there way to future Apple products.

- Apple Copland: was to be a successor to Mac OS 7 being developed between 1994 & 1996. Ultimately never released in favor of Mac OS 8.

There may be other unreleased Apple codenames & products but information on these are pretty scarce.

What other vaporware hardware & software (Not just video games) interests you, share your comments other unreleased hardware products.

4 hours ago, Wadmodder RiderPùdu said:

Windows Codename Longhorn

These still exist, there's even videos that cover its development cycle and all known builds before it was rebooted into Vista:

On 7/13/2020 at 10:16 PM, STILES said:

Probably the pilot episode of "Saban Moon" just to see just how big of a train-wreck it is 

 

 

Other than that I've always wanted to see the original, non slide-show, version of London after Midnight.

First thing that sprung to mind.

On 7/22/2020 at 7:50 PM, TheStupidestBeing said:

Probably the first ever animated movie, made by an argentinian, "El apostol", it got turned into a hairbrush, so i think it's completely lost.

The same guy also made a movie called "Peludopolis", wich is also lost, and i think it also turned into a hairbrush.

Hairbrushes? Is it common practice in Argentina to recycle celluloid into hairbrushes ?

2 hours ago, Tetzlaff said:

Hairbrushes? Is it common practice in Argentina to recycle celluloid into hairbrushes ?

idk, i live near Argentina, but i'm not argentinian, guess they like to brag about how they brush their hair everyday with the oldest animated move :/

Heck, speaking about software where I just mentioned the Windows XP Starter Edition, I did my first contribution to LMW on preserving the hard-to-find Windows XP desktop themes from Microsoft made in the 2000s. Here's the forum post I created: https://forums.lostmediawiki.com/thread/4146/partially-microsoft-com-windows-themes

Heck, I even made my own standalone version of the Windows XP desktop themes for those who don't like installers (and the hassle to uninstall the desktop themes). For many of the desktop themes, I took a few liberties to them, mainly translating most of the foreign language desktop themes to English. In the case of the Embedded theme, I found a rare image of the Windows Embedded POSReady 2009 wallpaper (where the visual style originated from) without the branding/logo on a deviantArt page that sadly doesn't exist anymore. So, fare with me here, the desktop themes here always don't look 100% like the originals, but I did this just for variety.

On 7/13/2020 at 5:18 PM, Endless said:

More akin to Warhammer 40k I think.

I think both are pretty valid examples of Doom-like stuff.

In Doom, teleport technology seems like it originates from lost alien civilizations, and might even use Hell itself as like a... dimensional slingshot. Depends on the game.

Warhammer 40K is very similar, because the warp is like Hell and humans have to use it for most space travel (including needing psychic protection).

In Event Horizon, the ship uses black holes (that apparently go through Hell) to teleport the ship.

Quake kind of spins the same web, of teleportation being somehow linked to the ridiculous evil crap pouring through them and Lovecraftian gods. Even the Strogg in 2 show favor of teleports.

In a way Half-Life kind of mimics this theme, except instead of Hell the other dimension is Xen.

So, you might say it's like... a trope. Like teleportation is based on evil, but it's too powerful a technology to ignore. I hate Event Horizon, but I can see where the comparison comes from.

Sorry for going off-topic, but I love that kind of inter-dimensional stuff. It's all very Lovecraftian, like "power you cannot comprehend", and abusing it leads to chaos.

Polybius

Also, my brother and I both remember this game that we're pretty sure was called Hard Hat. It was a cartoony game where you could build things, from a side perspective, and really there was no point to it except making cool looking towers as far as I remember. Anyway we've searched and searched and can find no trace of this game anywhere online...

On 7/13/2020 at 9:27 PM, insertwackynamehere said:

Apparently the director’s cut of Event Horizon is lost forever. That’s kind of the Doom movie that never was.

Yeah I've heard that's been lost in some sort of abandoned mine or something. Odd place for storage.