Well, my ambitions early last year to update this site more often did not really come to fruition. That is the life of someone who is precariously employed! Anyways, this week (specifically January 7th) will mark the 25th anniversary of SNES Central. A number of years ago, I wrote an article about the formation of the site, so you can read about it here rather than me repeating the story.

At any rate, rather do some retrospective on the 25th anniversary of the site, I asked if anyone had some SNES prototypes to release. nz136x sent me the prototype of Tetsuwan Atom (鉄腕アトム - aka Astro Boy). The cart says it is about 60% finished. Anyways, thanks to nz136x for this prototype release!

The Video Game History Foundation has launched an amazing tool that allows you to search their online library of materials. This amazing effort is something that I will make good use of to investigate SNES games! The first test I made of this is to fill in a gap in the unreleased games list that did not have any prior information. Airborne Ranger was an overhead action game released on various computer platforms in the 1980s. A SNES port may have been announced, but after utilizing the VGHF library search, not much comes up. At any rate, it is now documented!

The Internet of 2025 is very different from the Internet of 2001 when I first started this website. The Internet of 2001 was chaotic. If you found an interesting site, but wanted to find similar content, your first instinct was not to "Google" it, because at that point search engines were kind of rudimentary. Rather, you would go to go to the links page of the website. The Internet was a collaborative place, where to succeed it was beneficial to help out other people making sites with similar interests by giving them a shout-out. The 2025 Internet is controlled by mega corporations that increasingly want to wall off the Internet, and stop you from the joy of exploring. SNES Central has always had a philosophy of letting the user have control of what they want to see. The interface has purposely kept a Web 1.0 style design (originally designed in 2005!), without a search function, allowing the user the joy of exploration. The Links page was something I removed at one point because search engines were pretty good at allowing you to find other sites that were of interest. At this juncture, with major search engines shoving generative AI down our throats, this is no longer the case. As a result, I have revived the Links page, with a selection of websites that I think will be of interest to those who visit SNES Central. It is my hope that with my return to the retro gaming scene that I will find new sites to add.

Dual Force is an unreleased game that was developed at the Human Creative School. The developer posted some screenshots on Twitter in 2023. I have written a summary of what little information is available for this game.

Now that I am back to updating this site, I figure that it is a good idea to update the unreleased games list of SNES Central. I have not updated it since writing the unreleased games section in Ultimate Nintendo: Guide to the SNES Library, and a number of unreleased games have come out in the past 6 years. I am starting with Mer Wars, which is a short demo created by Synergistic Software as a pitch. I have included some images of the documentation from this pitch, which were from an auction in 2019.

It has been two years since the last post, but I thought I would give an update as it is the 24th anniversary of this site. Last year was a crazy busy year in my life, and 2025 might very well be the same. I can't promise when yet, but I do hope to start doing some updating of the site on occasion this year. I feel with the rise of AI generated slop infecting the Internet that it is important to have this old school site up and running with new, verified information. ;)