A Saturn prototype has surfaced and been preserved this week, and it’s a particularly interesting one: not a known cancelled title that fans had been tracking, but a game that nobody in the community even knew had existed.
The disc, labeled Pyramid: Sega Saturn (3-26-97), was spotted in an auction listing last month by a Saturn fan named Cerbero. The community pooled resources to acquire it, and what they found inside was a tech demo containing a scene from the 1996 PC game Pyramid: Challenge of the Pharaoh’s Dream. A CD-R signature identified the engineer behind the port as Alexander Ehrath, and the Hidden Palace preservation team tracked him down for an interview.
The story Ehrath tells is familiar in the broad strokes and specific in its disappointments. The Saturn port never made it past the tech demo stage because the publisher cancelled the project before it was ever announced publicly. It didn’t fail publicly, didn’t accumulate a legend, didn’t get written up in magazines. It simply stopped existing, and nobody outside the people who made it knew it had been attempted until a disc showed up in an auction three decades later.
The Hidden Palace interview also surfaces a couple of other Ehrath projects that fell through. He worked on a World Series Baseball game for Sega of America that was ultimately passed over in favor of a localised version of one of Sega of Japan’s Greatest Nine titles. He also worked on a second ill-fated Saturn baseball game for SegaSoft. Two abandoned baseball games and a cancelled port of a PC puzzle game are a rough run, but the Saturn era was full of projects that dissolved before anyone got to play them.
The Pyramid disc image has been released by Hidden Palace for anyone who wants to run it. The full interview with Ehrath is available on the Hidden Palace Podcast, and a technical breakdown of how the Saturn tech demo works has been published at Rings of Saturn.
Source: Hidden Palace Podcast via Sega Saturn SHIRO
