What "Lost Media" are you interested in?

In regards to some lost or obscure Valve media, I would say a filmed but never released or seen alternate ending of the infamous 1999 Half-Life: Uplink film.

This short film was pitch as an ill-fated found footage-styled short promotional video produced by Syndicate Pictures & Cruise Control after being commissioned by Havas Interactive (a parent company of Sierra Entertainment at the time), with Valve not even acknowledging it's existence, and little to no input from them other than sound effects & music taken directly from the first game. It was pulled out of rotation after being distributed on the internet for a few weeks or days in March 1999, but a few uploads had been made available on YouTube. Here's the film in all it's awfulness:

The film itself even lacked any kind of character development. There are also only a few original non-canon characters featured in the film, and not even featured in any of the games of the series. These are Jaz Meadows, an unnamed scientist, a Barnacle, possibly a Vortigaunt, an HECU soldier, and a Black Ops Assassin.

On what we know about this unseen alternate ending? There were at least two filmed ending. The one you can commonly see floating around the internet for years is the one with the Black Ops Assassin where she kills of a HECU soldier and saves Jaz Meadows where the film ends with a sound of a helicopter in the background while the alternate unseen ending version would had Jaz Meadows killed by the HECU soldier. As mentioned in ValveTime Database episode 5 where they discuss the Half-Life: Uplink film, Chris Birch mentions that the presumed released version didn't include the Black Ops Assassin as an ending, meaning that the only version actually available online isn't the final cut or likely that the unseen version where the HECU soldier kills Jaz Meadows was planned as a final cut. Unfortunately, this is the only known information we know on the unreleased alternate ending version of the 1999 Half-Life: Uplink film. You can watch ValveTime's Database episode of the Half-Life: Uplink film on YouTube.

By the way, the film itself got mostly poor reviews by Half-Life fans. Even some reviewers (possibly around the early days of the internet around 1999) called the script "incredibly cliché and lacking dynamic fluidity," calling the film "horrible." However, it was also credited for the effect and insight it created on its small budget. It is also the only official Half-Life film (as of today), as well as the earliest Half-Life fan film, even though it wasn't meant to be a fan film, preceding the number of Half-Life fan films you see on YouTube today.

A strange piece of lost media I have is a film called "Silent Law". I have a German VHS version of the film, and the English version seems to be impossible to find. It's a terrible action movie, but the movie poster looks cool and that seems to be the only thing about this movie that has circulated online, I've seen it used in those "Retrowave" videos as the picture to the video. I've heard that there is a private online group that has access to a digital upload of the English version, but they are not sharing it publicly. I did get the VHS converted, but the people that did it must not have realized it was in PAL format because they didn't convert it like they were supposed to, so I'm looking for an alternative method at the moment of getting it converted to digital format. 

3 minutes ago, Gerolf said:

A strange piece of lost media I have is a film called "Silent Law". I have a German VHS version of the film, and the English version seems to be impossible to find. It's a terrible action movie, but the movie poster looks cool and that seems to be the only thing about this movie that has circulated online, I've seen it used in those "Retrowave" videos as the picture to the video. I've heard that there is a private online group that has access to a digital upload of the English version, but they are not sharing it publicly. I did get the VHS converted, but the people that did it must not have realized it was in PAL format because they didn't convert it like they were supposed to, so I'm looking for an alternative method at the moment of getting it converted to digital format. 

Is it playable on a VHS player? If so, you could buy a usb - composite thingy to view the VHS on you computer's screen and then record the screen.

It's playable on a NTSC VHS, but it shows the picture in black and white. I might have to get a PAL VHS player. 

Gugusse et l'Automate, 1897 French short film by Georges Méliès. First depiction of a robot in a movie. Unfortunately lost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gugusse_and_the_Automaton

The Thing II, the sequel to the 2002 video game, The Thing. Although it was cancelled, some videos and concept art got released.

https://thething.fandom.com/wiki/The_Thing_II_(video_game)

On 7/22/2020 at 2:50 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.

I don't know where did you got that hairbrush thing, both of these films got lost in a fire.

Anyway, I'm interested in any type of lost media, but the ones that i really want to see or at least have more information on would be these:

-Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood (the 2007 movie)

-All of Quirino Cristiani's filmography.

-The band behind the mysterious song.

-The latin-spanish dub of Fist Of The North Star.

-The Sega Saturn build of Knuckles Chaotix.

I wonder if there are lost doom wads.

30 minutes ago, Danzer said:

I wonder if there are lost doom wads.

There surely are many Doom wads that got never released.

There’s also some WADs that were released in some format, but the ability to access them has been removed one way or another. 

Another gaming lost media I'm interested in are early pre-release builds of PC games sent to some PC gaming magazines during the 1990s. Back between the early to late 1990s, many PC gaming magazines would preview pre-release builds for review and possibly feedback to a developer or publisher on improving the game. You can see many of these screenshots on Internet Archive's magazine archive or on other magazine archival websites. Sadly, only a few of these builds would ever see the light of day, while others still haven't been released at all.

Here's a few examples of pre-release builds I know of right now:

DOOM 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5 Alphas & Press Release Beta (early to late 1993)

DOOM II July 1994 Build (only the maps have been released by John Romero)

Duke Nukem 3D 0.99 Beta (early 1996)

Half-Life 0.52 Alpha (September 1997)

Numerous Shadow Warrior (classic) Builds (1993-1997)

There maybe other pre-release builds of these PC games, but these are unlikely to had been kept by the developers of those games or reviewers who previously previewed these builds, and information on these builds are pretty scarce.

2 hours ago, Wadmodder RiderPùdu said:

Another gaming lost media I'm interested in are early pre-release builds of PC games sent to some PC gaming magazines during the 1990s. Back between the early to late 1990s, many PC gaming magazines would preview pre-release builds for review and possibly feedback to a developer or publisher on improving the game. You can see many of these screenshots on Internet Archive's magazine archive or on other magazine archival websites. Sadly, only a few of these builds would ever see the light of day, while others still haven't been released at all.

Sometimes magazine editorial staff would include a beta by mistake on their coverdisks, which is how some actual pre-release builds got leaked. IIRC one the most well-known leaks of this kind was the Warcraft II Magazine Preview Alpha. But that one was a demo with four missions specifically created for the preview.

More recently, thanks to Hallfiry's magazine coverdisk catalogue I found a beta version of Steel Panthers (a WWII tank wargame by SSI). Unlike pre-release demos by SSI, this has lots of missions and features, and was most likely not intended to be made public.

A different German magazine coverdisk (PC Power No. 8-9/95) has what appears to be a development build of FX Fighter, again mistaken for a demo by the editors, apparently.

Oh, and Hallfiry also found a playable beta of Tomb Raider (DOS version) on yet another coverdisk. Really unpolished, and with lots of self-running demos (as opposed to about three -- I don't remember exactly -- in the final version; maybe just one). It does not support high resolution modes. Again, it was likely included by mistake, because there are data files for all levels, although the demo might be limited to only some.

These pre-release press betas sometimes have a limit on how many levels you can play, but include data for all levels. There's one beta/demo of Panzer General which is like that, it has all maps but you can only play two I think.

2 hours ago, Wadmodder RiderPùdu said:

Duke Nukem 3D 0.99 Beta (early 1996)

Numerous Shadow Warrior (classic) Builds (1993-1997)

IIRC, both Duke3D beta 0.99 and SW beta 0.90 were leaked. In at least one instance, a computer from 3D Realms was sent to the tech service which leaked the beta (I think it was Duke3D, maybe both). The others were made public after the Duke4.net team had a go at the 3DR archives and the SW betas became available with permission from franchise owners. I don't think any of these ever went to magazines for preview, mags usually received screenshots and press releases for early previews, and were granted access to a close-to-release version for reviewing purposes later in the development cycle.

There's also a leaked alpha of Blood, including the source code. I don't remember the details of this leak though. There used to be a site documenting these but it's now gone.

I remembered a few more findings of this kind. When the forums at RGB Classic Games were active we made some pretty interesting discoveries, but now the forums are down sadly, and only some stuff is preserved by the Wayback Machine:

Some missing game versions

Notable game findings with Hallfiry's coverdisk catalogue

In addition to the Heretic and Hexen betas that you all probably know about, there's a beta demo of Blood with I believe three levels, version 0.91. It was found by Litude on the PC Gamer CD-ROM (Disc 3.2) (May 1997) coverdisk. No idea about the differences there though.

There are several early demo versions of Chasm: The Rift (some contain the subtitle The Shadow Zone instead of The Rift), a few can be found here.

A while ago I also found a beta demo of Descent II which is slightly earlier than the regular demo of the same game. I did not look closely into it (it would crash soon after start, perhaps intentionally), but the demo was obviously leaked judging by the documentation. The regular demo of the game is pre-release as well, and the differences are documented at TCRF.

One CGW magazine coverdisk had a playable pre-release demo of Descent to Undermountain which was then reproduced by other magazines. Interplay apparently intended to release a more up-to-date demo but this never happened.

There are several development builds of the DOS port of Super Street Fighter II Turbo. The content is the same as in the final demo, namely you can play as Ryu or Chun Li (in three versions each) on Zangief's stage. The MIDI music is missing and there seem to be other differences but I'm not familiar enough with the game to tell more. The entire thing is not very interesting overall because this is a PC conversion of a released arcade game, so any huge pre-release features that were cut or changed drastically are unlikely.

UPD: I just checked Hallfiry's catalogue again and it seems that the absence of MIDI music in the early SSF2T demos is explained by the fact that these were the CD version demos. One coverdisk has WAV tracks on it for the demo, presumably they were supposed to be burned on the CD as CD Audio but the editors did not or could not do it.

Three early demos of In Pursuit of Greed are known, with some noticeable differences from the final release, and between each other as well.

There's a CD demo of Eradicator that comes with a trailer (not seen elsewhere I believe), but otherwise the same as the first Internet demo v1.02. This one does have some differences from the final version too, notably Kamchak's and Eleena's slot 2 weapon projectiles are swapped, plus some other things here and there.

BTW, did you know that the demo of Entomorph is for DOS, while the full game only had a Windows release?

Also, speaking about DOOM where I mentioned the pre-release beta's, I wonder if there are any other sources of DOOM's textures floating around old multimedia CD-ROMs (that sometimes contain photos, graphics & image files) floating around that were released from other software companies. Time will tell.

Since many of DOOM's textures were source from Aris Entertainment's Mediaclips series of multimedia CD-ROMs, here's the releases of Mediaclips that are confirmed to had been released by Aris Entertainment:

Americana

Animal Kingdom

Business Backgrounds

Full Bloom

Island Designs (2 disc set)

Jets & Props (2 disc set)

MPC Wizard

Majestic Places

Money, Money, Money!

New York, NY

Tropical Rain Forest

Wild Places

World View

Video Cube series

Other than the Best Of Mediaclips CD-ROM which reuses some of the images of the other releases of Mediaclips, any additional comparisons of Mediaclips image files & DOOM's Textures are very limited, as the Mediaclips CD-ROMs are unavailable on abandonware websites other than Internet Archive.

If you know about other sources used to create DOOM's graphics (Sprites or Textures), let me know about it.

In the case of lost cuts of films for me, the unaltered releases of Star Wars Episode IV, V, & VI are of interest to me. The original releases of the Original Trilogy were released multiple times on numerous old home video formats such as VHS, Betamax, Video 2000, Laserdisc, & CED from 1981 until 1995. We all know that the special editions of the Original Trilogy from 1997, 2004, 2011, & 2019 really do suck big time, but since George Lucas is always dissatisfied by the limitations of Film Reels, he always goes with definitive vision as the official De Facto standard for the official Star Wars home video releases.

As far as I know, the 1997 special edition only exists today on VHS, Laserdisc, & Video CD. The 2004 only exists today on DVD. The 2011 only exists today on Blu-ray & DVD. The current 2019 special edition currently exists on Disney+, Ultra HD Blu-ray & Standard Blu-ray, but it is unlikely to see a DVD release for right now.

There's also a website that talks about Star Wars on home video which you can visit here: http://www.swonvideo.com/

There was at least a DVD version of the original unaltered releases of Episode IV, V, & VI from 2006 bundled with the 2004 Special Edition, but dare I say to you, it isn't even good. This release was actually source from the 1993 Definitive Collection Laserdisc releases, but with Episode IV modified to include the opening crawl without it's subtitle used in later releases. However, there were also a few problems with these releases:

- The image & sound quality was not enhanced for the DVD standards at the time

- The picture was presented in Non-Anamorphic Widescreen, which was common on a few Laserdisc & VHS movie releases from the late-1980s to early-2000s, and therefore was not enhanced for modern widescreen televisions & 16:9 televisions during the HDTV era

- Presence of digital noise removal motion smearing, which is noticeable on the speeder in the Mos Eisley Spaceport entry scene

- This transfer also suffered from faded washed out colors & contrast, as well as severe aliasing, with stair-like jagged edges on oblique lines

This means that this release, now commonly referred to as "George's Original Unaltered Trilogy" or GOUT for short is the final home video release of the original unaltered releases of Star Wars Episode IV, V, & VI.

Prior to this DVD release, Many Star Wars fans were transferring the older NTSC & PAL Laserdisc releases on the internet shortly after the 2004 Special Edition DVD release. Even before the 2004 Special Edition DVD releases, there were many bootleg releases & transfers of the 1993 Definitive Collection & 1997 Special Edition Laserdisc releases in numerous Southeast Asian countries where rampant Video Piracy was common, but these releases weren't even better either, with the picture & sound quality being even lower quality than their original Laserdisc releases and are worst quality than the GOUT DVD. In spite of that, these at least though you would rarely see before 2004 when there weren't any official Star Wars Original Trilogy DVDs yet, so it was filling a niche. Who says bootlegs aren't useful? The Anti-Piracy advertising filming firms always know that.

We always had seen these Anti-Piracy PSAs from the 1980s up until the 2010s. Here a few I know of in this Playlist I created, most of them are from the FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft):

Even years after these were released, they give us a feeling of nostalgia & hilarity.

Post hell.

On 8/18/2020 at 12:09 PM, MassiveEdgelord said:

Post hell.

Do you mean the old forum category from Doomworld that got removed from the forum with it's interface update?

2 minutes ago, Wadmodder RiderPùdu said:

Do you mean the old forum category from Doomworld that got removed from the forum with it's interface update?

Yeah it sounds fucking epic!

Just removed the last couple of posts linking to a massmurderer's doom stuff. We don't want this here.

3 hours ago, Mordeth said:

Just removed the last couple of posts linking to a massmurderer's doom stuff. We don't want this here.

Yeah, now that I think of it, it really wasn't considerate of me to do that... Many people out there still believe that "games cause violence" nonsense, so its best to indeed stay away from that... Not to mention just having respect for the victims, I don't know how I didn't even remember that... Sorry, I will try not to do it again...

This is an excellent question! There's a man from a town I've visited called Grantsville, who gave everything he owned, including his house, to make a full length movie. The man was Kimball Johnson, and he was the subject of a documentary titled "Pigweed Philosopher: the Untethered Zen of Kimball Johnson."

But the lost media is not the documentary, but rather the movie he made, called "The Racketeers." I've gotten in contact with his family and neighbors to help locate it. Sadly, Mr. Johnson died two years ago, but the search for his magnum opus is still ongoing.

I would love to hear all the lost music from the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles tv show composed by Dennis C. Brown and Chuck Lorre. Yes, the same Chuck Lorre that produced Big Bang Theory, Two and a half Men, and countless other shows that we love to hate.

The music consists of drum machine synth rock and atmospheric synthscapes that would be great to hear without all the sound effects and dialogue from the show. There are a few people who cut some of the songs together from the show and someone who tried to recreate some of the songs from scratch, but both results are quite poor despite their efforts. Unfortunately, the best way to hear the music is by watching the show.

On 8/22/2020 at 2:19 AM, Mordeth said:

Just removed the last couple of posts linking to a massmurderer's doom stuff. We don't want this here.

Well if any links of downloads with anything related to Harris's levels isn't accepted here, then what about any wads that were never released with the only traces of them being screenshots, such as the many wads of the now defunct website WADs in Progress. Nobody here in the DOOM community hasn't recreated any screenshots of unreleased wads, the only exception being Dr. Sleep's Lethe which was recreated at least twice, first in Ultimate Doom the Way id Did & the second in Master Levels Deluxe.

In the case of other games, I haven't seen anybody recreate the screenshots of two of the GoldSrc era versions of Team Fortress 2 (Valve's Team Fortress & Brotherhood of Arms). Basically the GoldSrc era of TF2 was going to be a realistic military FPS game, before Valve decided to switch TF2 to the Source engine.

As far as I know, nobody has created a maps-only recreation of TF2's GoldSrc era (Valve's Team Fortress/Brotherhood of Arms), and any ModDB page that has a mod based on the TF2 GoldSrc era always are dead, either due to ModDB's policies on unmaintaining mod projects based on it (likely due to the screenshots being copyrighted by Valve), the lack of people working on those mods, or the lack of any resources to recreate the maps in general. So far the only things related to the TF2:BOA GoldSrc era that were released were the famous Counter-Strike maps de_dust & de_dust2 created by David Johnston, as seen in this comparison of the map itself & TF2:BOA.

The only TF2:BOA related project still in the works is of course Half-Life: WAR, which is being created by cambreaKer. I wish someone else would had created a maps only recreation of TF2:BOA (& also Valve's Team Fortress), I myself am not even talented or even thought about doing so.

Another example of unofficial recreations as a mod for a game is those "Simulated Screenshots" of the front & back covers of Wizardworks' D!Zone series. These screenshots were recreated by Nevander, but so far nobody has done a playthrough of the recreated map so far on YouTube. You can see the recreated screenshots here: https://imgur.com/a/QzMM2

On 8/8/2020 at 1:04 AM, Danzer said:

I wonder if there are lost doom wads.

I remember one. Back in early 2000ish, I was visiting the site of a guy called Jez. I was there originally for his list of best C64 demos, but he was also making Doom WADs and there were some to download. I remember he had an unfinished WAD he liked how it evolved because of the scary progression (you would open a door and accidentally drop in a dark corridor with hanging bodies) and we were even talking in email, he said "if you want to continue building on this wad, be my guest". I unfortunatelly can't find this WAD or most of his other works. Also,. searching everywhere I found a very old post in doomworld asking about his WAD. It really feels like XKCD 979 at this point :) 

Besides Doom, my search for lost media would be demoscene related stuff, a bit obscure for most.

On the Amstrad CPC 8bit computer for example, there are classic demos like Elmsoft's Chain Demo, which only survived disk image has bad sectors, so a certain part with a mythical huge sprite cannot be loaded anymore,. I only hear rumors from friends who had seen this part back in the 90s. Stuff of myths :)

In term of games never released, from demoscene group,. but there is the non playable demo, honorable mention goes to Into the Shadows by Triton (as Starbreeze Studios) https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=2588

Their engine was a software renderer 3d with hard shadows and amazing character animation back in time before even Quake. Unfortunatelly the game was never released for financial reasons I think.

Last but not least, the Sega 32X Tech Demo by Zyrinx (a game company also by demoscene members), there is only a VHS tape capture of it, pretty damn impressive for the 32X, I wish I could see the actual binary but might have been lost.

There has rarely been any lost demoscene projects that anybody can find undocumented on the internet. Alot of the lost video games are games that we're cancelled during development or before the release date, most of them are for old gaming consoles, but also for Arcades, old home computers of the 1970s & 1980s until the early 1990s, and the modern PC era (either MS-DOS or Windows).

YouTuber onaretrotip has a playlist on cancelled video games for various old gaming consoles & home computers, in addition to arcade games and cancelled gaming projects based on Marvel & DC comic book franchises.

There are also a few video game consoles that were never officially released or never really worked on, but any information on some and/or many of these unreleased consoles is pretty scarce for right now.

Lost Media is such a fascinating topic. I love watching videos about stuff that is missing, and it almost gives you a creepy, unsettling feel.... I think it is just sad to know some things people took time to create are missing forever. Like I am curious about all the silent films that are gone... the fact that MAJORITY of them are lost is just plain sad. Just the idea something existed, and there's evidence it did, but barely a trace of it left?

One thing lost media always makes me think of is the things I made that are gone forever. I get depressed thinking of that haha. Stories I've written when I was young that I didn't back up, etc. Somehow the first crappy "novel" I wrote when I was like.... 11 or 12 survived.... only because I printed it out and stapled it together. Apparently I had 2 copies because I clearly remember shredding it, only to YEAR LATER find it. It doesn't want to die lol.

redundancy of data is important. even in the modern world, when we have plenty of tools for backing up data, lots of stuff gets lost or trapped in archaic formats. for example, this may be hard to believe, but the original Star Wars films (as seen in theaters in the late 70s/early 80s) were nearly lost, because only the Specialized editions were released (which had various changes and sfx added). luckily the fans intervened, so we have projects like Harmy's Despecialized, 4K, Silver Screen, etc. which faithfully capture the originals.

what I'm most interested in is all the lost content from classical antiquity. while we have great works from Ancient Greece & Rome, there's lots more (histories, poetry, religious texts, plays, philosophies, etc) that are lost to time. we can only wonder what we're missing from the ancient world.

Also, speaking about Half-Life where I mentioned the ill-fated Uplink film, there's also alot of assets that are (or were) still missing or replaced, in the build of Half-Life 2 that was stolen in 2003. Mainly textures & models, and maps that never materialized with only a few remnants included. The HL2 beta community has recreated most of these, but others like the missing textures have yet to be recreated.

Also, something few people rarely discuss, that of course is Half-Life: Source. It's rumored that Valve supposedly lost the source code to the Source engine version, and are just porting over the GoldSrc source code over to Source badly.

Heck, Nobody has bothered to unofficial patch all the maps included in the Source version of Half-Life for possible map leaks & mapping errors. So far, somebody on Github has unofficially patched c2a5c to fix the skybox leak. Why nobody else has patched the other maps included in Half-Life: Source is completely beyond me, maybe the HL1 community calls these maps copyrighted & don't want to unofficially patch them. I mean heck there is no such thing as a term for "Internationally Copyrighted Valve-made Map".

So, I wonder if anybody can decompile the included in both the GoldSrc & Source versions of Half-Life & compare them in JACK or Valve's Hammer Editor to find mapping errors & possible map leaks? Here's the VDC wiki page about map leaks: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Leak

Add me to the list of people who would love the chance to see the cut footage from Event Horizon.

Also Duke Nukem: D-Day, a cancelled PS2 game by the same studio that did Time to Kill and Land of the Babes

Also, forgot to mention in the software-related section where I mentioned Unreleased projects from Microsoft & Apple, some Adobe Flash content is going to be lost around 2021, but thankfully we have the Flashpoint project to preserve & to play those Animations & Games with.

Prior to the announcement of Adobe Flash's EOL in July 2017, many of the Flash content on websites were lost in the mid-2000s to mid-2010s due to websites shutting down. I am not sure about the other web browser games that used other plugins like Adobe's Shockwave Player, Java, or other web application plugins released in the late-1990s to early-2000s, as Flashpoint only has quite a few or a lot of those games or content preserved.