Images in this article are credited to Neo-Geo.com member NeoTurfMasta, who boasts a very cool name from a very cool game.

April 28, 2016 Update: We have a followup to this article, which can be read here.

One of the most exciting things about being a gamer is the potential to discover new things about your hobby that you hadn’t ever expected before. Countless online forums that focus on discussing the nuances of a particular game provide testimony to that fact, as do sites like The Cutting Room Floor, which shed light on what could have made it into the final versions of history’s most beloved (and not so beloved) games.

But perhaps the one event that creates the most buzz in gaming communities is the discovery of entirely new games which never saw the light of day. They invite us to question what went wrong during the development process, and marvel at the level of effort their creators sometimes put into their creations before they were ultimately scrapped. One recent example includes Rockstar’s plans to create a Grand Theft Auto game based in Tokyo, which was abandoned due to the layout of Japan’s roadways, as well as the models and brands of cars.

For the retro arcade community, a mysterious untitled game for the Neo Geo arcade system is the latest talk of the town. Last Saturday, a user named NeoTurfMasta on vintage arcade game website Neo-Geo.com posted pictures of a strange developer board that he had acquired last year from a Japanese auction site for a hefty sum. After much toil, he extracted the ROM files from the board, compiled them on his computer…

And found a completely unheard-of game. Since the board’s Fix and Sound SRAM cards (which provide the game’s text and sound, respectively) were dead, NeoTurfMasta was unable to divine the game’s name from its data murk. What he did find were the remnants of an unfinished game that he feels might have had great potential:

There are 12 characters, though several are still very rougly drawn or unshaded. Some dont have hitboxes and some are missing frames of animation. The ones who are complete and very nice. It looks like it would have been a very interesting fighting game. Each character looks to have 3 classes:

Chaotic
Neutral
Lawful

And depending on what class you pick your character’s speed, stance, special moves, and special bar change. Even the character’s win screen sprite changes depending on the class. Two characters have animal companions who can be used in attacks. The bosses are not selectable, but I managed to get their win poses a few times and (kind of) pulled out their sprites while I was messing with the C roms. I’m sure someone will be able to get good rips of them, that’s just beyond my knowledge.

The artists spent a lot of time on character and level design. I am sure someone from the team is still out there and can claim credit for their fantastic work. It is so sad to think these artists (and programmers) worked so hard on this for it to be lost.

The characters have default classes assigned at the select screen. You can only change their class in the debug menu during game play.

NeoTurfMasta’s discovery elicited much applause and intrigue from his fellow retro arcade game enthusiasts. But one question remained: just what was this game?

The answer came yesterday in the form of an official statement made by Takumi Matsumae (alias Coin), who formerly worked for a small game studio called Toy Pops as a pixel artist. According to Coin, he was part of the team developing the game; he recalls that the game was tentatively named Dragon’s Heaven, or something to that effect. The studio developing it was named FACE, and Toy Pops was outsourced for the project.

The story goes deeper. FACE was partially made up of ex-members from Technōs Japan Corporation, which was best known for the Double Dragon and Kunio-kun series (today, Technōs’ former properties are now owned by Arc System Works). A former Technōs graphics developer named Kouji Ogata – who had previously worked on Technōs fighting games like Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer – stated that Dragon’s Heaven was FACE’s first foray into the fighting game genre.

As it turns out, the April 1997 issue of Neo Geo Freak contained an interview with former Research and Development head of Technōs, Kengo Asai, who would later go on to work on Dragon’s Heaven. Asai stated that Dragon’s Heaven was planned to be a story-heavy game with lots of text written by Asai, an oddity for arcade games of the time. FACE hoped to release a Summer teaser for the game in 1997, with a full release of the game by the end of the year.

The original Neo Geo Freak article.

But, as history demonstrates, that never came to pass. How Dragon’s Heaven‘s development board found its way into the hands of a Japanese collector is another story, but one that isn’t uncommon in the world of retro gaming. Development and prototype copies, after all, are often sold off to interested parties and circulate their way through collector communities for years.

If you’d like to read the full statements made by the above developers, you can read the translated tweets here in this article by The Madman’s Cafe.

There’s no telling whether there’s another, more complete version of Dragon’s Heaven exists somewhere out there. You can, however, watch gameplay footage of it here, where fighting game enthusiast and competitor Rotanibor attempts to figure out how this game might have played if it had been finished.