ROM for Abandoned Akria Game for the SEGA Genesis Discovered
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Just after inventing the wheel, man-kind created the SEGA genesis and if you’re old enough to remember this relic from the 90’s, then you’ll also remember putting in thousands of hours playing Sonic the Hedgehog, Streets of Rage 2, and Ecco the Dolphin. What we didn’t know at the time however is that we were so close to getting a Sega Genesis game based on the anime Akira.
Thanks to the magic of the internet and retro gaming communities, the prototype for the game appeared almost twenty years after it would have made its debut back in the Jurassic Period in 1995. Twitter lit up like a Christmas tree when the news dropped that there was a playable version of the game, which apparently would have been titled ‘Akira’ based on the opening of the game. There’s about an hour of gameplay footage currently available online.
The original game play footage was released during a Consumer Electronics Show in 1994, but the talks of its release died off when the developer for the game, Black Pearl Software shifted from THQ, who at the time was their parent company. They planned on releasing two versions of the game, one of them was set to come out on Nintendo and Game Boy but those died out as well. Which left the original 1988 Akira game for the Commodore Amiga CD32 and the NES as the only play that you could run the streets of Neo Tokyo as the red leathered leader of the Capsule Gang.
One user of the fandom community over at the game preservation site Hidden Palace was gifted a pair of circuit boards that was loaded with a prototype of the game, and blogs about the gameplay was put up online and is pretty much riddled with bugs and glitches, and only about two thirds of the game are even accessible. However, the one third of the game that is there was mined by someone who definitely knew their way around a ROM.
I guess we’ll never know about the dystopian thrill that a Sega Genesis Akira game would have been.
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