Lost SEGA Rally Nintendo DS prototype discovered after 20 years

An unreleased SEGA Rally game for Nintendo DS, lost for two decades, has been recovered and documented by a game preservation group. The prototype was reportedly created by DC Studios as a technology demo to show what the studio could do on the handheld, but the project never moved past that stage.

According to a report first published by Time Extension (relayed by Nintendo Everything), the demo dates back to roughly 2006, around the same time SEGA Rally 2006 hit PlayStation 2. That makes it older than SEGA Rally Revo, which launched in 2007. The only SEGA Rally title to ever appear on a Nintendo platform before now was the Game Boy Advance port of SEGA Rally Championship, so a finished DS game would have been only the second outing on Nintendo hardware.

The preservation group has released a video showing the prototype running, and the demo is now playable. For anyone who tracks cancelled games, it’s a small but important find: another piece of a series’ history that almost disappeared is now saved and documented.