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The Hidden Palace is a community dedicated to the preservation of video game development media (such as prototypes, hardware, source code, artwork, and more). This website can be utilized as a catalog for the items that we and others are able to collect and share.

If you are interested in contributing, please see our How to Contribute page.

Past news

Jul 6, 2024: Vanished without a Trace - Out of the Vortex for the Sega Mega Drive

Apr 9, 2024: Crash Tag Team Racing (Xbox Prototype)

Jan 21, 2024: Crash Bash and Spyro 3

Jan 1, 2024: New Years 2024 - Sonic Heroes

Dec 25, 2023: A Very Bandicoot Christmas - Crash Bandicoot: Warped Prototype

Nov 24, 2023: 6GUN: BattleBourne's Unreleased PlayStation 2 Game

Oct 31, 2023: Daredevil: The Man Without Fear - Unreleased PlayStation 2 Game

Feb 28, 2023: Phantasy Star Online Prototype

Feb 15, 2023: PSP Release Candidates

Dec 25, 2022: Project Deluge: Xbox 360 and Wii

Dec 9, 2022: Semradical!

Nov 24, 2022: Sega Technical Institute’s Cancelled Segapede

Nov 23, 2022: Sonic 3 and Feel Preproduction VHS Tapes!

Oct 31, 2022: Happy Halloween 2022! Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for the Tiger Game.com!

Jan 1, 2022: New Years 2022!

Nov 13, 2021: Go Go Goemon! Mystical Ninja Goemon Zero

Oct 10, 2021: Mortal Kombat prototype for the Sega Mega Drive

Sep 18, 2021: Project Deluge: Xbox and Dreamcast

Jul 24, 2021: Angels with Burning Hearts: Burning Rangers Prototype

May 1, 2021: Crash Landing

Apr 17, 2021: Project Deluge: PlayStation 1, Saturn, and CD-I (Part 2)

Mar 20, 2021: Project Deluge: PlayStation 2

Jan 1, 2021: Dreams Come True: Sonic 1 (MD) Prototype

(earlier news)

Latest contributed articles

• Hitman 2: Silent Assassin (Feb 11, 2002 prototype) by Funtimeandrefoxy
• Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (Jan 18, 2005 Multiplayer prototype) by Funtimeandrefoxy
• Star Wars: Jedi Knight - Jedi Academy (Aug 8, 2003 prototype) by Dink
• Star Wars: Jedi Knight - Jedi Academy (Jul 2, 2003 prototype) by Dink
• PiRaSoFt by Lemurboy12
• TRPS by Lemurboy12
• ADDICTION by Lemurboy12
• DiGiTaL by Lemurboy12
• Sega Channel (Feb, 1996 prototype) by Missile
• Prototypes by system/Nintendo 64DD by FWKPedia
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Pinocchio (Early prototype)
Pinocchio (Jul 26, 1995 prototype)
Pinocchio (Dec 4, 1995 prototype)
Pinocchio (Dec 6, 1995 prototype)
Pinocchio (Dec 12, 1995 prototype)
Pinocchio (Jan 5, 1996 prototype)
Pinocchio (Jan 9, 1996 11.20 prototype)
Pinocchio (Mar 12, 1996 prototype)
Pinocchio (Apr 9, 1996 prototype)
Pinocchio (Apr 10, 1996 prototype)
Pinocchio (Aug 5, 1996 prototype)
Discuss this release on the boards here!

Apologies for the long delay! We have some more goodies to share with you courtesy of Radar as part of his lot from Virgin. This time we have even more prototypes of Pinocchio, 11 of them to be exact. All for the SNES!

One of the things that stood out among the items in this lot were the multitude of prototypes from the production of Pinocchio. Previously, we released a prototype of the unreleased 32x version and while there weren’t any prototypes of the Sega Mega Drive version, there were many PCBs with EPROMs burned with various prototypes of the SNES port which was development side by side with the Mega Drive version.

Luckily, unlike most games development around this time, the developers were kind enough to leave the build timestamp within the ROM itself. We can use these dates as a guide to follow along with the development timeline of the game during its last few months of production. Unfortunately, the earliest prototype in the lot lacked any build date, but was most likely used at some event hosted sometime that year (likely E3 or CES). As to be expected with how far these prototypes go, many of the earlier prototypes contain noticeable differences in comparison to their final builds. Surprisingly the Japanese localization was among some of the prototypes in this part of the lot as well.

The build dates, while they cannot be confirmed to be 100% accurate, paint a very confusing picture about the development and release of the game. While researching information to put in each prototype’s article page, we were puzzled as to why the games took so long to come out despite having build dates that predated the final release dates almost by an entire year. For the longest time, it was assumed that the build dates were in MM/DD/YY format, but were actually in DD/MM/YY format - painting a different picture as to when the final games were actually released. The final European version, for instance, was the very first version to hit retail. Surprisingly, this was then followed by the Japanese version a few months later, which was then followed by the United States release. The final European release of the SNES version was dumped and released online by the scene sometime in May of 1996. So it’s possible that the reported final release dates are incorrect, and the games were actually released much earlier and possibly far apart from each other.

We hope these prototypes are interesting enough to inspire someone to take a further look into the production of Virgin’s Pinocchio. Who knows what other mysteries are left to uncover?

With that said, until next time!