Brontoforumus

As far as we can tell, the game appears to have been long forgotten until this point – and you can kind-of see why. A Simpsons game in which you play as a bug? It’s a strange concept, for sure, but would make for a perfectly cromulent game.

Hidden Palace wrote:Today we are introducing the first part of Project Deluge, an ongoing project to assess a gigantic lot of various video game prototypes, pre production assets, and archival material spanning multiple console generations. These aging items were miraculously rescued from being destroyed, thrown away, or sold through the herculean efforts of one person. This person not only took on the task of backing up everything in their possession single handedly, but was so overwhelmingly kind enough to let us look at and preserve each item in his collection with no strings attached. Yes that’s right, all of it. For nothing in return.

In their ongoing quest to document video game prototypes, hardware revisions, source code, artwork, and all kinds of other development ephemera, the preservationists over at The Hidden Palace have released 178 prototype game builds—30 of which are from games that never saw a commercial release! These releases are mostly from older cart-based systems, ranging from the NES to the GBA, and run the gamut from completely broken to playable.

Shortly after the video and its related screencaps made the rounds, former Duke Nukem Forever project lead George Broussard confirmed its apparent authenticity on Twitter, telling fans that "the leak looks real." He said that while it may be playable, it shouldn't be looked at as a game, "just a smattering of barely populated test levels."

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Broussard made clear that he isn't invested in closely checking the latest leak's authenticity and pointed to an uneasy relationship with the game this many years later. "I’m not really interested in talking about it or retreading a painful past," he said. But while the build may have paled in comparison to other megaton shooters being promoted in 2001, including that year's Halo, this week's newly revealed sequence shows some of its content aging decently, particularly its implementation of sprite- and particle-based explosions and real-time lighting effects.