Games That Weren't's founder Frank Gasking revealed earlier today that he has managed to preserve another lost Enigma Variations game, following the discovery of unreleased NES versions of Sensible Soccer and Populous.
This time it's the turn of the 1993 side-scrolling mech beat 'em up Mechanoids 2 - The Final Conflict to join the Game That Weren't Archive — a previously unheard-of SNES game that was pitched to various publishers in the early '90s before eventually being put to one side.
Enigma Variations, in case you're unaware, was a UK development house that was active during the '80s and '90s and was initially responsible for creating budget games for the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, C64, Amiga, and ST, before later branching out into developing titles for the Nintendo hardware. It reportedly operated under a couple of different names during the time it was around, also releasing products under the names Dark Technologies and Phoenix Interactive Entertainment.
According to Gasking, he discovered the two prototype builds of the game after being entrusted with a set of development disks by the former Enigma Variations developers Mark Greenshields and Darren Melbourne, with both of these prototypes working pretty much without issue in the SNES emulator, SNES 9X.
The first, dated 1992, isn't playable, according to Gasking, but instead seems to be a simple graphics demo showing two large mech droids walking down a road. The second, meanwhile, was produced a few months after the original and is a short interactive slice of the game that contains revised mech designs, as well as the ability to battle enemies.
Writing on the Games That Weren't website, Gasking said that he has so far been unable to locate a Mechanoids 1, making this discovery a slightly puzzling one. But the researcher states that they will be updating the archive entry with more information, should anything else come to light, so maybe there's a chance that this mystery will be solved in the near future.
In the meantime, if you fancy checking out the demo, you can grab both of the builds here.