Unearthing Hardcore, DICE’s long-lost Sega Genesis shooter

In the early 1990s, after making its name with a pair of successful pinball games, Digital Illusions — which would go on to become Battlefield studio EA DICE — tried its hand at something more ambitious. Called Hardcore, it was a run-and-gun shooter with huge, detailed levels and frantic action. “It could be said that Digital Illusions’ motivation for creating games comes from looking at other examples of genres, sneering, and making them better,” gushed a preview in British games magazine The One. “With Hardcore, though, the boys are aiming at a very competitive area of the games market.”

Despite all of the hype, Hardcore never actually launched. Much like Nintendo’s Star Fox 2, it was a victim of timing. Hardcore was virtually complete, but it would’ve debuted toward the end of the Sega Genesis’ lifespan when much of the audience had moved on to flashier 3D games. It was ultimately canceled, and the developers shifted to new projects. Outside of a few magazine previews, little of Hardcore remained — until some people went looking for it.

This year, nearly 25 years after the game was set to launch, Hardcore will finally be playable, and it’s actually launching in two different ways: Strictly Limited Games is releasing Hardcore on the PS4 and Vita, while today, retro console maker Analogue is announcing that the long-lost shooter will come bundled on its upcoming aftermarket Sega Genesis, the Mega Sg. “It’s really an intense hunt,” Analogue founder Christopher Taber says of the process of tracking down old unreleased games.

This isn’t the first time Taber has gone through a process like this. For Analogue’s upscale Super Nintendo, the Super Nt, the company included an unreleased director’s cut of beloved shooter Super Turrican. But tracking down that game and securing the rights was fairly straightforward. By a stroke of luck, Julian Eggebrecht, the former creative director at now-defunct Super Turrican developer Factor-5, was actually an Analogue customer who loved the products and was excited about the idea of a re-release.

For Hardcore, Taber had no such connections. “I basically just started contacting everybody I knew who had worked on the game at some point, and eventually got a hold of some people, and coincidentally there was another couple of people who around the same time were trying to get rights for the game,” he says. “It ended up as a collaborative effort.”

Hardcore was also a game that Taber had been tracking for a long time, reading scans of old magazines and following threads in classic gaming forums. As someone dedicated to the concept of preserving video game history, Hardcore was something of a holy grail: a nearly complete game that never actually launched. “There are tons of games throughout video game history that have been cancelled relatively early in their development, so there isn’t so much to see,” Taber explains. “It’s not like if they released what they had it would even be playable. It’s just at the 20-40 percent mark. There aren’t that many games that have been confirmed to be totally finished, or close to totally finished, and have been cancelled.”

He was particularly worried about potential legal and licensing issues that might arise, given that DICE had been acquired by EA. In Taber’s experience of tracking down unreleased games — which, he says, has included a lot more misses than hits — large companies can be a difficult roadblock. “It’s an uphill battle,” he explains. “The bigger companies are not going to be interested in things that are going to be boutique and risky, and then there’s a whole slew of legal issues.” Taber recalls getting close to a deal with a “major developer” to release multiple canceled games, only for several licensing issues to interfere; multiple pieces of art had to be redrawn, and the entire soundtrack had to be changed. The deal never went through. “That kind of thing in my experience is par for the course,” he says.

While it took some time to get in touch with the right people, in the case of Hardcore, the original team behind the game was at least interested in releasing it, and they never ran into major licensing or legal issues. The problem was that no one seemed to know where the game actually was. During the process, Taber and his partners were unable to find any actual design documents or other materials, until eventually, they stumbled upon an old, dead hard drive that was luckily recovered. It included what is believed to be the only available source code for Hardcore; if it had been lost or destroyed, the game would cease to exist entirely. “There’s nothing else,” says Taber. It’s a potent example of the real need for proper preservation, something that rarely happens in games outside of a few dedicated groups. “I don’t think the video game industry was forward-thinking in its early days, in terms of the long-term lifespan of some of these things,” says Taber.

Once the code was recovered, the team found a game that was almost entirely intact. Taber describes it as 99 percent complete, with just a few bugs and fixes that needed to be ironed out before launch. For Mega Sg owners, it’ll be a nice bit of video game history that’ll come included on their console when it launches in March. But for Taber, who spent years following Hardcore and ultimately tracking it down, it’s something a bit more special, particularly when he was finally able to play it for the very first time. “It was way better than what I imagined,” he says.