10 Cancelled Video Games You Can Actually Play

Video game development is so hard, it's a miracle that anything ends up being released. Not only is making games incredibly difficult, but there’s also a chance that after you’ve poured thousands of hours into making it, your publishers will just end up cancelling it anyway.

After putting so much time into making a video game, some developers are going to "accidentally" leak their work online. If you spend thousands of hours making anything, it makes sense you're going to want to share it with the world, or at least talk about it after the fact.

This isn't the only way cancelled games can end up being playable in some capacity, though. Sometimes they're included in an official form, in another game.

Sometimes a demo comes out for a title that never releases, allowing you to get a taste of what could have been.

While playable cancelled games are rarely polished experiences, they are a great insight into the development process, and the stories surrounding them are always interesting, highlighting just how hard it is can be to design a video game.

Dinosaur Planet was an N64 game that was being developed by legendary studio, Rare.

Whilst working on it, Shigeru Miyamoto essentially walked into the room and suggested it should be turned into a Star Fox game. The developers started to change everything, and then had to move over to the GameCube where it became Star Fox Adventures.

That's where the story stood for a while.

Dinosaur Planet was cancelled and Star Fox Adventures was released to general confusion from Star Fox fans, because it barely resembled a Star Fox game. Instead, looking to play almost like Zelda, and be focused on larger open spaces. Curious.

The story remained like that until a team called Forest of Illusion dumped an unfinished build of the original N64 version of Dinosaur Planet on Twitter.

Today we have released Dinosaur Planet by Rare for Nintendo 64. The development was halted and moved to the GameCube, where it was then released as Star Fox Adventures. Enjoy! (More info in this thread).

Link to the dump:https://t.co/gQGGcU4vJK pic.twitter.com/Orub7RU3fa

— Forest of Illusion (@forestillusion) February 20, 2021

The fully playable build is dated as being from December 1st, 2000, meaning that this is quite a late version of the game.

Whilst the playable character in this game is Star Fox protagonist Fox McCloud, there are references to Sabre who was the original hero. This implies the build was significantly far along, before being turned into a Star Fox sequel.