Holy shit!! My all-time white whale suddenly showed up
Monster: Ancient Cline was supposed to be the arcade sequel to an indie PC fighting game called Monster. It always looked really promising, but ended up disappearing quietly. I always hoped I'd get to play it, and even tried tracking down some of the beta testers to see if anyone had a build, but no luck. And then! Just last week, someone noticed that a build's been circulating on the Chinese web, and uploaded it to archive.org. It's there! It works!
The files are dated late 2009, or maybe a year and a half into development. Probably pretty close to the end of the original dev working on it.
For those not in the know, this was long advertised as one of the three pillars of Examu's arcade board, the other two being Arcana Heart and Daemon Bride, but it never made it past location test and Examu never explained why... people at the time just presumed Examu had generally cooled on eX-Board plans after Arcana Heart 3, but a decade of dormancy suggests bigger issues on the dev side. There are all sorts of rumours about the dev now working at Arcsys or wherever, but a lot of those same people also insisted the dev had previously designed Jon Talbain for Capcom, which is complete bullshit, so, y'know.
I've heard there's someone working on the netcode for the PC build who, within the last year or two, has been purporting to represent the dev and has been talking about finding a publisher to officially finish the game, but it's not something I've investigated, or that I'd be inclined to take seriously either way.
