Are there any known prototypes for the first Kingdom Hearts game? I'm not looking for them to be released, I'm just wondering if any exist at all outside of Square's vaults. In particular, early trailers for the game (from TGS 2001 I believe) feature different textures and lighting, as well as a planned release date of Winter 2001 (they pushed it back to early 2002). Perhaps this version once existed on a disc that someone has possession of? The only earlier-than-retail version of the game I know of is the trial disc, which is a demo version that was available in Japan only and is slightly rare. As expected, it doesn't sound like there is any beta content on that disc as the modify date for the game's ELF was only 2 weeks or so prior to the final version's modify date iirc. So, is there any luck that some early undumped content might still being out in the wild, or is that unlikely to be the case?
I can only speak from my experience, but I have looked around for this sort of thing before (anything related to the alpha/beta phases of the game) and I'm afraid I've never found a single thing. I know there are debug versions of Kingdom Hearts 2 and Re: Chain of Memories, but they're only around three weeks older than the US release date. Unfortunately, the alpha/beta Kingdom Hearts stuff might be lost forever. (From an interview) "In June 2013, Nomura stated that the original game assets for Kingdom Hearts had been lost some time ago. He explained, "[The game data] was lost, so we had to research, and we had to dig out from the actual game what was available and recreate everything for HD. We had to recreate all the graphics and it was actually not that easy." This is why huge companies like Square Enix need to back up their old files! (Or leak them to the internet =P) I doubt there's any beta content left from the first 10 Final Fantasies...
