Saturday, May 14, 2022

Rare Mega Man X Pre-Release Footage Features Unused Maverick


Nearly 30 years later and we're still learning more about Mega Man X1. A segment from an old episode of GamePro TV was recently unearthed (hiding out on YouTube for over ten years!) and it features long-lost footage of an early pre-release build. Chief among the many differences, there's a very brief shot of a completely unused, never-before-seen Maverick! 



The strange beast first appears at the 8:22 mark above. You can see what appears to be a VERY early stage select screen, which leads to a side portrait of the unused Maverick. A full-body sprite appears seconds later in a flash. 

The quality isn't the best, but you can definitely make out a snout, tusks, pincers, massive shoulders and a curved tail. It looks a bit like an amalgamation of Sting Chameleon and Spark Mandrill, doesn't it? Or some kind of scorpion-boar thing?

Make no mistake - we've NEVER seen this guy before. No concept art exists, not even within the pages of Mega Man X: Official Complete Works. It's a total mystery. 

Pending additional footage (if there is any) we can only speculate and wonder. For now, well... fan-artists, will you answer the call here?

Thanks much to CrAzy for the tip!

19 comments:

  1. i really hope we get a X1 prototype at some point, because this looks awesome - there's a lot of visual changes too, and i prefer how this prototype looks to the final game. it even has different enemy behaviors! that's an awesome find.

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  2. Looks like a Scorpion of some kind.

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  3. It is a Manticore! A legendary animal having the head of a man (often with horns), the body of a lion, and the tail of a dragon or scorpion.

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    1. Oh! Well they could have made it look a lot more like one.

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  4. J.D. Roth tried. He really did. But I mean, they probably gave him a script and he just read it as written… Like, for example… "ten NES and Game Boy prequels"? Sorry, but the latest releases for those systems at the time of this game's development were Mega Man 5 and Mega Man (World) 3. Now, if you were to count Mega Man and The Robots Are Revolting on MS-DOS, that would bring it up to 10. However, he specifically read "NES and Game Boy", so…

    Anyway. This was really awesome to see! I love seeing what might've been. That beastie is definitely some sort of manticore or very literal antlion thing, for sure. What's even funnier is that its face kind of looks like Shining Tigerd, minus the beak-y thing. Wonder if Tigerd's design was inspired by this scrapped boss?

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    1. JD Roth wasn't the host here it was Scott Decker for this show. I guess Gamepro was trying a different show format at the time when these 5 episodes of Gamepro's Power Up in December 1993 aired and it those were the only ones that exists. As for the Megaman games that were around at that time it you were right though part 6 for the NES wasn't available in North America until early 1994 but was already available for the Famicom by the time this show orginally aired in December 1993 around the week of Christmas.

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  5. Is it just me or does he kinda look like X2's Raider Killer?

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  6. A mix of Neon Tiger and Sting Chameleon, with a pose similar to Spark Mandriller.
    And perhaps, since the map shows that its icon is on water, it would have been the boss of Octopardo's Stage instead of Octopardo himself.

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  7. I was tired of just watching X dive news here until this: I can't believe we have still things to spot from the X1 Prototype version, it even shows a pre-water snake from the Launch Octopus stage...amazing :O

    Anyways, wasn't there a proto build for sale like 1 or 2 years ago? I guess someone bought that but never wanted to dump or post ant pics or things from that build, it went completely silent after the auction ended...perhaps a Capcom dev just bought it so no one could actually know what it was about?

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  8. Wow. What a Find. Well done,Protodude. Now hopefully the community can unearth that Alpha Build with the White City.

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  9. Yes it's good to return to the good old days! Capcom? Someone?lol.

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  10. WOW! Very cool find. This prototype is all the more tantalizing to unearth in full one day, with any luck

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  11. I'm not sure what it's supposed to be? It's like a beat/scorpion/ rat thing.

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  12. IIRC in the Complete Works book, they talked about how they had a rule against using mythological creatures, but that changed with X4. Perhaps this was from before that rule was put in place. It seems like much of the sprite was reused for Spark Mandrill.

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  13. Hey! Check this! https://archive.org/details/twitter-1301400582536589312

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  14. I'm going to take a different approach on this, and guess that it's an Antlion, featuring elements from both the insect and a real lion.

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