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A large haul of Atari Lynx prototypes has recently been recovered and shared online, as reported by Games That Weren't, the popular video game website dedicated to cancelled and unreleased games.
The haul was preserved thanks to the efforts of Marty Goldberg, Mike Lee, Tempest, and Dutchman2000 over on the Atari Age Forums, and includes, among other things, Monster Demolition. This is a game that seems to have originally been intended as "a new spin" on the arcade title Rampage, but that was eventually cancelled in favour of an actual port.
Monster Demolition was notably one of the very first titles Atari teased for the Lynx, appearing in several magazines and newspapers, and is also said to have featured on early packaging for the console.
Previously, it was believed that all that had survived from it was a few early marketing screenshots and some low-quality footage from a Japanese outlet, with the rest of the game simply being lost to time. However, a fully playable build of the game has now been recovered, thanks to members of the Atari Age community, allowing people to experience this lost 1989 game, all for themselves.
Compared to the four characters featured in the Lynx version of Rampage released in 1990, there are only two to pick from here: a large King Kong-esque ape and a Godzilla-like lizard, which are clearly stand-ins for George and Lizzie. The levels also seem different, with the first stage taking place in a suburban neighbourhood rather than in the centre of a city.
Tempest wrote the following about the discovery:
"Thanks to the generosity of Marty Goldberg, Mike Lee and I were able to dump a large cache of Lynx EPROMs at MGC this year. As we suspected most were the final versions (although we now have dates for these), but hidden amongst these final copies were some very early WIP titles.
The most interesting of these prototypes was one labeled Monster. I initially assumed it was a copy of Elvira and the Party Monsters Pinball since that was the only Lynx game with monster in the title that I could think of, but when I finally got a chance to fire it up I discovered that it was actually Monster Demolition (a.k.a Rampage Deluxe)!"
[...] The game seems fully playable, I was able to go through about five levels and didn't see anything that looked broken (although there were a few glitches)."
As Tempest went on to state, Monster Demolition is arguably "the crown jewel of this find," but it wasn't the only prototype the group dug up. Another find was a new build of the Atari Lynx port of the arcade game Vindicators, which Games That Weren't previously covered in detail in its book.
Sadly, as Tempest states, this version didn't turn out to be "the long lost complete version of the game," but is apparently "further along than the only other known prototype and plays pretty well."
You can find out more about the contents of the haul over on the Atari Age forums, which is also where you'll be able to download all of the prototypes recovered.