Starting today, iam8bit is opening preorders on Xcavator 2025, a brand new NES game, on a real NES cartridge, with 100% of the profits going directly toward our preservation work here at the VGHF.
This isn't just any NES game- this is based on a prototype made all the way back in 1991! You might remember our story about recovering and rebuilding an unreleased Days of Thunder game for the NES from the archives of its programmer, Chris Oberth. What we didn't tell you at the time was that we found an unfinished demo by him for another game, Xcavator.
An act of altruism from the industry After we recovered the data, our friends at Incredible Technologies, where Xcavator was originally created, were kind enough to donate all of the game's copyrights to us. Developer Mega Cat Studios stepped up to donate their time finishing and polishing up Oberth's work, and Lost in Cult stepped up to donate the brand new key art on the game's packaging. Finally, iam8bit agreed to publish and market the game on our behalf, eschewing all profits and sending them straight to us!
This really is a first-of-its-kind: a lost game that was donated back to the archivists who recovered it, and a multi-company effort to publish it as what just might be the first commercial game to fund a preservation charity.
The cartridge is available to preorder now. We have plans to make the original prototype and its source code available for free as an educational resource as well, stay tuned for that!
From the Video Game History Foundation newsletter.
I've seen three articles about this, but I still don't know what genre of game this is.
Yeah, I've been looking all over for a trailer or some gameplay footage, but I can't find anything.
Some gameplay, finally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIy3PwqGYOs
Thank you!