A treasure trove of never-before-seen Xbox games has been discovered, and there are some nice surprises

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• A treasure trove of never-before-seen Xbox games has been discovered, and there are some nice surprises

Game development is as much a story of rans as it is of blockbuster hits. For every Halo there is a failed FPS prototype, for every Mario Kart there is a racer whose engines stopped before leaving the starting grid. Today we get a wonderful look at some of the titles that nearly graced the original Xbox and Dreamcast, thanks to the unveiling of a priceless cache of never-before-seen versions and prototype games at Hidden Palace. Hidden Palace, if you've never heard of it, is a game development preservation community, collecting not only these early builds and prototypes, but never-before-seen artwork, hardware, code, and more. His latest initiative was “Project Deluge”, which brings together material from thousands of development discs and shares the best of what has been found. The latest release is a true blast, with early releases from Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Jet Grind Radio, WWF Attitude and more coming to the Dreamcast. But it's the Xbox stuff where there's some really wild stuff.

In search of the lost Xbox

Perhaps the biggest gem here is a never-before-seen English location from Dinosaur Hunting: Ushinawareta Daichi, which despite its nearly complete appearance never left Japan. It's as if Jurassic Park crossed paths with Monster Hunter and was destined for the original Xbox.

(Image credit: Hidden Palaces) Then another nearly complete game, starring the heart of the Saturday morning cartoon, He-Man. He-Ma: Defender of Grayskull saw a PS2 release in Europe but nowhere else, and its Xbox version, now maintained by Hidden Palace, never saw the light of day. Another interesting find is an almost complete version of Pac-Man World Rally. It made its way to PS2 and Gamecube, but this Xbox version never got past the prototyping stage.

(Image credit: Hidden Palaces) The fact that many of these games were close to completion but never made it to their intended home on the Xbox says a lot about the console wars of the time. The original Xbox was a powerhouse and paved the way for the modern day hits of Microsoft's Xbox Series X. But it couldn't compete with the mighty PS2, which remains the best-selling console of all time with more than 155 million units sold worldwide. Publishers will likely see a better possible return by only focusing on one PS2 version and letting the Xbox time ports falter. One last curiosity to highlight among the hundreds of articles here is an unpublished title called The Vatz. Developed by Beenox Studios for PC and Xbox, it was unveiled at E3 2002 and ran on a custom engine called Goliath, which was said to be capable of advanced physical renderings. Planned to be a vertical segment to appeal to publishers, the demo went as deep as the third-person sci-fi game's development, and faded into obscurity.

(Image credit: Hidden Palaces) There's much, much more to find in Hidden Palace, and there's even the option to download the versions for those who want to try and get them to work on original hardware or emulation software - a feat that's . More than possible, depending on the site. Take a tour and let us know if you find any gifts we missed here.