Digital Pictures games are forever destined to the “love them or hate them” category. But any time a canceled Sega Saturn game appears in working form, regardless of the game, it is a big deal.
Known for their FMV games like Night Trap and Sewer Shark, Digital Pictures was nearing the end of its life span when it started porting games to the Sega Saturn. They managed to port over Corpse Killer, Quarterback Attack and Double Switch before closing down shop. They seemed to have finished a port of their FMV boxing game, dubbed Prize Fighter: Heavyweight Edition. But the company shut down before they could ship it.
Builds of the seemingly complete game have rarely surfaced over the years. A combination of private collectors and copies of the builds literally rotting away prevented Saturn’s Prize Fighter from appearing in full to the public.
A video shows someone showing off the game in action at “Portland expo Oct 2015.” We assume this means the 2015 Portland Retro Gaming Expo. Unlike the original Sega CD game (the only officially released version of Prize Fighter), the full motion video stretches across the entire screen on Saturn.
Despite this expo demo, a fully working version of the game would go unreleased. The only people known to own it said they were broken builds.
On October 23, a fully working build of the game surfaced. While the files are still not out there, video capture of the game working on an emulator was posted to YouTube by Todd McHenry. Since Prize Fighter and many other Digital Pictures games are still owned by active companies, McHenry said he is not at liberty to make the build available for download. Many Digital Pictures games were remade for modern consoles over the past few years, and Prize Fighter is presumably on deck for a remake in the near future.
McHenry posted this comment on the YouTube video: “This was built with original backups from the mid 1990s of the source files so there wasn’t any physical media involved so I guess technically it has been “dumped”. No public release just yet and unfortunately has to stay in limbo for a little bit longer. Hopefully maybe soon. I don’t own the rights and the rights holders are very much alive and still making new remakes of these games so we can’t just throw it up on archive yet without them knowing and approving it even if that’s what I would really like to do.”
Hopefully the build will be released at some point, if anything, for the sake of preserving video game history. Though we can understand why McHenry does not feel comfortable posting the build, we can rest easy knowing a fully functional version of the game is being digitally preserved on his end.
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