Thanks to being an official Nintendo-branded magazine, Nintendo Power was well known in the '80s and '90s for featuring coverage of games well in advance of its competition.

It's true, a lot of these games would later grace the pages of other magazines on the road to release, but in some cases, there were titles featured within that weren't really covered anywhere else — some of which never saw the light of day.

One interesting example of this is Railroad Tycoon for the SNES/Super Famicom, a 16-bit port of Sid Meier and MicroProse's early '90s business sim that was featured across several issues of Nintendo Power from April 1991 to October 1993 before seemingly running out of Steam (along with a supposed Mega Drive port teased in Sega publication MegaTech). Geddit? Steam, Steam train? Oh well, never mind!

For years, we've only had a few static images of what this game would potentially look like, but over the weekend, it appears there's been a pretty big discovery in relation to the cancelled project, with a BlueSky user named wowmd publishing what they're calling "the first footage of the cancelled SNES/SFC port of Railroad Tycoon to ever be posted online." This means that your would-be Cornelius Vanderbilts and James J. Hills can finally see what they missed when development was pulled to an abrupt stop (sorry!).

The footage in question is 2 minutes and 19 seconds long, and gives a brief look at the intro screen and main menu (which seems to be inspired by the 1991 Amiga/Atari ST versions of the game, but features redrawn graphics), as well as the in-game UI (which we have to imagine would have been compatible with the SNES/Super Famicom mouse). It also shows off various simulation elements that players should be familiar with from other versions of the game, including laying down tracks and stations, purchasing trains, and scheduling routes to build an empire.

According to wowmd, the footage was captured from a promotional tape made by the would-be Japanese publisher, IGS Software, and notably seems to feature the English-language version of the game.

Unfortunately, it's still not clear exactly why the game was cancelled, but at least now we can see a little of the game in action, rather than simply having to imagine what could have been.