10 Lost Video Games That Were Discovered Years Later

Considering the worldwide cultural impact of it, it's surprising that there haven't been more attempts at turning 1988's Akira motion picture into video games. 

The Japanese Famicom tie-in was poorly received, but there was an attempt made by THQ in the early 90s to bring Neo-Tokyo to a variety of platforms (Mega Drive, Sega CD, Game Gear, SNES, Game Boy). These were shown to gamers in magazines and briefly at the 1994 Summer Consumer Electronic Show before vanishing without a trace. Behind the scenes, each version of the game was being cut one-by-one, with the Mega Drive version making it the furthest before also being axed.

And so the game became lost media for two decades, until Boxing Day of 2019 - appropriately, the year the film is set - when a prototype of the Mega Drive version was uploaded to the internet.

Players would finally get a good look at the game, even if it was only semi-complete, to find that's contents are as wide a net as the original choice of systems. Each level bounces from one genre to the next: driving, first-person Doom-like exploration, side-scrolling adventure, isometric combat and so on.

It's an appropriately audacious direction for audacious source material, featuring some stunning cutscenes for the time and in retrospect could've been a late-era Mega Drive classic if it had made it over the finish line.