The Sega company has been around for years and it’s recently celebrating its sixtieth anniversary. Over the years we’ve seen this company bring out some home consoles, mobile devices, and ultimately transitioned into software only producing studio. Still, there are a ton of great IPs under Sega’s umbrella and it could mean for some great new installments, remakes, and even remastered editions. While some games don’t tend to catch the spark for Sega, we do at times see these prototypes make their way online.
One of those prototypes actually saw a surprise release on Steam after it originally failed to gain much attention from Sega initially. Golden Axed was a reboot for the original Golden Axe franchise that was presented to Sega back in 2012. One of the developers at the time who was handling this title was Tim Dawson. According to Tim, the requirements were essentially laid out to make a darker video game for Golden Axe which the team attempted to do.
However, Tim Dawson noted that at this time, Sega had forced some crunch conditions on the team to produce this game. Apparently, it was a nightmare to handle with inept management with unreasonable conditions just to scrap the game after the company felt it wasn’t enough like God of War.
Then all of the sudden without any messages to the developers behind the prototype or credits, Tim Dawson found the prototype available from Sega. There was a description line at the time that stated the following.
“Golden Axed may be janky, may be buggy, may be an artifact of its time, but it offers a unique glimpse into the prospect of a project that could have been.”
Whereas Tim Dawson fired back by saying “go f-ck yourself, parasites.”