An unreleased Mega Drive/Genesis game is finally getting an official commercial release nearly 25 years after it was thought to have been canceled for good on Analogue’s Mega Sg Console. Hardcore is a run and gun, Contra style game from Digital Illusions which was being worked on in the early 90’s. By 1994 the game was canceled, despite being nearly completed, due to publisher Psygnosis anticipating poor sales thanks to a dwindling market for the old 16-bit consoles. Digitial Illusions changed their name to DICE and since that time has quite a shockingly successful career which culminated in them being bought by EA in 2006.
Well, thanks to retro gaming company Analogue and their upcoming home console designed to play official Mega Drive/Genesis/Master System cartridges, the Mega Sg, the game is finally getting a physical release. Analogue recently announced that each Mega Sg system would ship with a copy of the unreleased Hardcore after a copy of the game’s source code was recovered from a hard drive. The game was officially announced as being finished last year when Strictly Limited, a German game publisher, announced plans to finish and release the title on PS4 and PS Vita. It is unclear how the new announcement from Analogue effects the plans for the games PlayStation console releases.
Analogue’s Mega Sg is slated for release at some point in April 2019 so it won’t be long before one of the most widely sort after unreleased games of the retro Sega library will be in the hands of hundreds of gamers. You can find out more about the Mega Sg and Hardcore over at the official website, where they reveal that for legal reasons Hardcore is being shipped as Ultracore.