Have you ever wondered what your favorite game was like before it was finished? What the developers changed, added, or even removed? What could have been? This would be me. I’ve had a life long interest in prototypes, glitches, and similar unseen medias. I still have this interest, but I’ve become cautious about delving into this little lost world after a recent event.
It all started with what seems to be a completely chance occurrence. I had been visiting some thrift stores throughout the day, looking for video games and robots to add to my collections. As it was getting late, I decided to check one last store before I went home. It was a little thrift store in the middle of town. I remember having many lucky finds there, and this day was no different. I walked in and headed for the DVDs and games section, as always. I was surprised to see over 15 copies of Tekken 4 for the PS2 sitting neatly on the shelves, all in various conditions. This was a somewhat common occurrence, although usually with VHS tapes rather than games. I giggled at the thought of how so many copies of the game ended up here. Not long after, I was handing a copy over to the cashier.
As soon as I got home I went to my room and wiped the dust off my fat PS2, which I hadn’t used in a couple weeks. I took the game out of the plastic bag and examined it thoroughly. The case was exactly the same as the others, although it had seen better days. The disc on the other hand was much different. It looked sort of like a bootleg CD-R, but it didn’t have a label indicating it was one. There was text, however. It read the following:
TEKKEN4 VER.1.3
TEST DEBUG DISABLED
2000/6/23
You can imagine my excitement at the sight of this. Perhaps I was drawing conclusions too early, but my mind instantly went to the possibility of this disc being a beta. I looked on the back to ensure there were no debilitating scratches or other damages, and then placed it in my PS2. I was giddy as I watched the typical boot fade into the start of the game. Instead of the CGI intro I was familiar with, the game immediately went to a dark blue screen. A voice clip of the announcer saying “Good Morning” played, and then plain white text appeared, similar to what was on the label of the disc. There were a few differences, those being the inclusion of Japanese text, the Namco logo in the
The main menu
bottom right corner, and two options: Start and Debug.
It was obvious at this point that I indeed had something special. My hands were sweating in anticipation. What secrets could this hold? Based on the date and version number, this had to be a very early version of the game, perhaps the arcade version being developed on a PS2. The first thing I tried was selecting Debug, which softlocked the game. I suppose that the debug truly was disabled. After a restart, I selected the first option. It sent me to a more simple menu. It was a black screen with white text that again had two options. This time, though, they were different. They were Story and Freeplay. I decided to try freeplay first in order to see the differences in gameplay. When selected, it sent me to a simple character select screen with low res images. All the options except for four were blanked out with a question mark asset from TTT1, most likely because the rest of the roster hadn’t been implemented quite yet. The four selectable characters were Nina Williams, Dean Earwicker, Fiona Gilberto, and Craig Marduk. Dean and Fiona, for the uninitiated, were early names for the characters Steve Fox and Christie Monteiro. For simplicities sake I’ll refer to these characters as their final names from now on.
All the selectable characters were new to this game, except for Nina. This had me curious. What was special about her to make her selectable in such an early beta? My mind wandered as I selected Steve, my favorite character in the series and former obsession. The gameplay of the beta was abysmal compared to the final. It was clunky, the stages were unfinished, the music was absent, and all in all it was underwhelming. I went back to the select screen and tried to pick Craig. The game softlocked. I reset and tried again with Christie. Another softlock. I was confused. Why would these characters crash the game? They were selectable for a reason. Maybe it was a quirk with the programming of the early menu, or they weren’t finished. Finally, I tried Nina.
When I selected Nina, a short loading screen appeared that said “Loading Story”. Obviously I hadn’t selected the Story mode myself. It started with the regular story mode format in Japanese, although much shorter with uncolored sketches. When I translated the text read the following:
Nina was hired to kill. She will kill. Earwicker must die. The assassin missed the taste of blood and the smell of
Japanese text on story mode
death. She enters King of Tekken 4 to pursue him.
Something unnerved me about this. Tekken 4 was always considered the darkest and most serious game in the entire series, but it never once seemed this dark. Maybe I was forgetting something. This didn’t matter because I fought anyways. I needed to see the secrets. There were five fights in total, four of them being against Christie and Craig, the only differences being their costumes and the levels. The final fight, however, was against Steve as in the final game. This fight took place in a seemingly complete level and contained a sliver of music that cut out after a couple seconds, descending into a quiet high pitched buzz. The longer it went, the more it pierced my ears. I triple checked my AV cables to make sure they weren’t the cause. I thought it was the game itself at this point, but I later learned that there was no sound at all. My chest sank and my blood went cold the longer it played. I became extremely weary of what was about to come. I pressed on anyways. I needed to see the secrets about to unfold. It ate me from the inside out. It was all I could think about. I needed to see it all.
After the final chunk of Steve’s health went down, the game skipped the win animations and instantly went to the epilogue of the story. I was surprised to see an animated cutscene. The camera very slowly zoomed in on Nina from behind. She was sitting in a room similar to the one in the final version, though darker and emptier. In her hand was a large black rifle that she stared at intensely. Nina didn’t budge for what seemed like ages. For a little bit, I considered restarting the console, but the zoom of the camera indicated this wasn’t a crash. It was intentional. After about five minutes, the camera changed angles to show the woman’s face and upper body. She opened her eyes very slightly and held the gun up, cocking it. This scene as well lasted a very long time. The longer it lingered, the larger my fear grew. This was all extremely unnerving, especially when remembering the final version. Dark as it was, it was never
Nina with her rifle
this worrying. Nina’s eyes pierced mine more and more the longer I peered. The ringing sound returned and so did the feeling inside my body. Her eyes were nothing more than white ovals, devoid of any and all life. No feeling, no sign of any life, no soul. They were empty. After this eternity the cutscene continued, but my fear didn’t fade. She moved to the hotel window and pointed the rifle out, focusing on Steve’s head. The ringing became deafening.
In what seemed like a split second, Steve went from standing, living, breathing, to becoming a squirming mass of flesh. He lay on the sidewalk, his head cracked open, leaking fluids and brain matter. Bits of skull floated along in the pool of blood that slowly formed. His beautiful light blue eyes quickly lost all life and rolled back into his rapidly fluttering lids. The gore itself wasn’t shocking. It was PS2 era graphics and sights that were common in M rated games. I don’t know what it was that hurt me. The camera lingered on this sight. The sound was now unbearable and my entire body felt cold and dead. I wanted to look away, but my body wouldn’t budge no matter how much I struggled. I needed to see. I needed to see it all. The focus was soon put back to Nina, who sat with the same blank expression adorning her face. She closed her eyes fully and turned the rifle away from the window. After
Game crash
another century of waiting, she turned it to face herself. She wrapped her pink lips around the barrel, tears rolling from her eyes. She was a monster. No soul of any kind until this very second. Her finger twitched in anticipation on the trigger. She then pulled it. The screen flashed extremely rapidly from red to green to blue in a seizure inducing matter and then froze on a corrupted image of the woman in her isolation chamber, sprinkled with the same colors. The buzz was now real.
After this I finally came out of my trance as a terrible crunching sound emitted from my PS2. I rushed over to unplug it, and manually pulled the disc tray out. I was horrified to find that the PS2 suffered a catastrophic hardware failure and completely destroyed the disc, ripping chunks from the plastic and melting through with the laser. I gazed at the disc for quite a while, thinking deeply of what I just witnessed, and placed the disc in a plastic bag and threw it in my desk drawer. My life continued as normal with no adverse affects. I still retained my interest in hidden content and my enjoyment of the Tekken series, but the event made me realize an important rule of life. Some secrets were never meant to be seen.