Another unreleased Saturn game made its way into the public's hands when Hidden Palace released three prototypes of Hard Boiled on its website today.
The prototypes are from June, July and August 1997 and were provided to Hidden Palace by the game's programmer, David "Pipozor" Saulnier.
Hard Boiled is a futuristic rail shooter somewhat in the vein of Night Striker where the player controls a hover vehicle with some ability to rise off the ground while dodging obstacles and shooting energy weapons at enemies. It features five missions with CGI cutscenes and an electronic dance music soundtrack.
Plot-wise, the game is a sequel to a three-issue comic book miniseries in 1990 to 1992 written by Frank Miller and published by Dark Horse Comics.
It was announced in a July 2, 1996, press release by would-be publisher GTE Entertainment as coming to PC, Saturn and PlayStation from French developer Cryo Interactive. As the Sega Retro page for Hard Boiled tells it, GTE Entertainment got out of the video game business before the game was finished, leading Cryo Interactive to publish the PS1 version themselves in their home territory, Europe, in October 1997.
A Japanese publisher, Sieg, handled the PS1 game there the following year on July 30, 1998, but a publisher was never found for the North American market nor for the Saturn or PC ports.
Cryo Interactive released one Saturn game, Atlantis: The Lost Tales, a PAL exclusive adventure game similar to Myst published by Sega in March 1998.
The earliest two Saturn prototypes of Hard Boiled from June and July 1997 lack cutscenes but they're implemented in the August one. But those earlier protos have options to advance to the next level or return to the main menu when they're paused, which have been removed from the August build.