The Cutting Room Floor
The Cutting Room Floor is a site dedicated to unearthing and researching unused and cut content from video games. From debug menus, to unused music, graphics, enemies, or levels, many games have content never meant to be seen by anybody but the developers — or even meant for everybody, but cut due to time/budget constraints.
Feel free to browse our collection of games and start reading. Up for research? Try looking at some stubs and see if you can help us out. Just have some faint memory of some unused menu/level you saw years ago but can't remember how to access it? Feel free to start a page with what you saw and we'll take a look. If you want to help keep this site running and help further research into games, feel free to donate.
Featured Article
Developer: Nintendo EAD
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: 2001, GameCube
Luigi's Mansion was one of the very first video games to be released for the Nintendo GameCube, that involves Luigi going through rooms in a mansion sucking up ghosts with a vacuum cleaner. It was different from the other Super Mario games, mostly because it focused on Luigi and had a clever combat system that would later be the sub-standard for the character itself.
But that's not all; the game has a lot of interesting early content featuring unused graphics, animations and a lot of leftovers from during development of the game. There's also a handful of other differences such as a completely different challenge mode in the European version.
All Featured BlurbsDid You Know...
- ...that Deus Ex has cut models and textures referring to cut White House and moon levels?
- ...that the Intellivision port of Centipede has a hidden message with a terrible pun?
- ...that Mega Man Zero 3 had e-Reader support that was cut from all non-Japanese releases?
- ...that the PC version of Plants vs. Zombies has a page of unused minigames?
- ...that Amiga developers really, really, really, really, really, REALLY didn't like pirates?
- ...that Maya the Bee & Her Friends was supposed to be a South Park game?
- ...that at least 23 games released on today's date have articles?
Contributing
Want to contribute? Not sure where to begin? Visit the Help page for everything you need to get started, including...
- Instructions for creating and editing articles
- Guides that will help you find debug modes, unused graphics, hidden levels, and more
- A list of what needs to be done
- Common things that can be found in hundreds of different games
We also have a sizable list of games that either don't have pages yet, or whose pages are in serious need of expansion. Check it out!
Featured File
Present in the Mortal Kombat audit menu (but only in the Y-Unit versions) is a listing for "Ermacs" which, due to being under the Reptile listings, started a popular rumor that Ermac was a hidden character that would be fought/unlocked when certain conditions were met. In reality, "Ermacs" refers to "Error Macros", a log for the developers for when the game crashed unexpectedly...but in the final version the counter can't actually go up and is just for show.
A little more background for this could be found in GamePro Issue 054 January 1994 page 34, where Ed Boon compares it to the Smash TV Warp Zone glitch. It would basically recover the system and put you back in the game, but the game creators called that glitch the Hidden Key Room. 'Ermacs' which are shortened from 'Error Macro' is similar to that. A programming technique to quell user errors (such as entering numbers when only letters are accepted.). What Ed did was by putting a counter of those errors that started in Smash TV, he decided to put a counter in the prototype revisions (listed as Error Traps) and later called it Error Macros, which led to the famous ERMACS counter. He even admitted this was not a character, but a counter for traps.
Ermac became a playable character beginning in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, with his backstory using the rumor as a base.
Archive
