I love games development. Sure, video games are my bread and butter, but I’ve worked in creating games (to varying degrees of quality) and especially love projects that never made it to market. So many games never make it and often are simply lost/deleted after the project falls apart. So it’s really weird to find a pre-Alpha build of a game in the wild, and even more weird when it’s mocked up to look like a full game, and super weird duper weird to find it in a second-hand shop. Yeah, crazy.
YouTube personality Ashens (one of the first channels I ever followed when YouTube was a wee baby) came across a copy of such a missing game. Titled ‘Explosion Royale’ the game looks to be a comedic military style game game with a style similar to Battalion Wars. The best way I can describe it is that it’s like a chibi version of Call of Duty.
The game is just barely playable, but from the into and the little gameplay Ashens gives us the game looks like it would have been a lot of fun. The Studio ‘King of the Jungle’ was behind the game, but nobody knows why it never came to be, or if it even went past the pre-Alpha form the video covers.
Even weirder is that it doesn’t run on a PS2 and only works through emulation, even though it’s mocked up to be sold as legit. It probably also works on a PS2 development kit, but we don’t really know for sure. The studio was bought out and eventually shuttered, so information is scare. Still, what we do get is a good bit of fun. Here’s to hoping the people over at Unseen 64 can make heads or tails of this.
Check it out below: