The Big Comfy Couch (lost build of cancelled Xbox game based on Canadian children's TV series; 2004)

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Tang6.JPG

Screenshot of the game's title screen assets.

Status: Lost

The Big Comfy Couch is a Canadian children's TV series that originally ran on YTV from 1992-1996 with 2 additional seasons that aired on Treehouse TV in 2002 and 2006 respectively. The show revolves around a clown name Loonette and her living doll named Molly who often solves problems throughout the show on their big comfy couch. In each episode Loonette reads Molly a story and performs an exercise called the "Clock Rug Stretch" throughout the episode and at the end, one of them makes a big mess around the couch which would require them to perform the "Ten Second Tidy" in order to clean it up in 10 seconds.

Xbox Game


In 2011, an article was made on Unseen64 about a cancelled game of the series developed in 2004 for the Xbox, before then, information on this game was very scarce with no screenshots or any mentioning of the game known to exist on the internet.[1][2] The article had 3 screenshots from the game. The first screenshot showed that the game was going to be a 3D platformer with a few meter-like bars on the screen, the second being the title screen that showed it was intended to eventually have Xbox Live support and the third with Loonette been beaten by a group of giant dust bunnies while being covered in "blood." It is unknown how far into development the game was before getting cancelled.

In 2018 LMW user "canadianchildhood" posted a thread on the Lost Media Wiki forums about the game which many users replying to with some even speculating it's to be a hoax.[3] A few days later YouTuber and LMW collaborator LSuperSonicQ decided to email Unseen64 to question them on the screenshot on the article who got a reply confirming the screenshots were real and that were sent from one of the developers who also released screenshots for another unreleased game called Power Rangers Legacy that ran on the same game engine as The Big Comfy Couch.

Search Effort

Months later Canadianchildhood mentioned that THQ published various Power Rangers games in the early 2000s, with 2 other users "dogpolygonrt66" and "ecofox" then posted the credit names featured in most of the Power Rangers games released around that time that could've also worked on Power Rangers Legacy. LSuperSonicQ then tries to contact them to no avail and to realize that Disney owned the rights to the franchise at that time.

The search was eventually moved to the Lost Media Wiki discord as the third On the Hunt channel as more users were able to help search for more information on it. LSSQ then emailed Unseen64 again to ask for any more details, they mentioned the name of a former Capcom employee Chris Tang who worked on both games, around that time he worked for a company called Genazea with another developer name Eric Suzuki (who was married to Alyson Court the actress who played Loonette in the show). Alyson then replied that the game existed but couldn't remember the developers name.[4]

Findings

At some point Chris Tang joined the LMW discord server confirming the game was real and posted some screenshots and a couple of mock-ups of the game, he also stated that the blood from the dust bunny screenshot was "grape juice." In Chris' words:

"I'm the owner of the only physical hardware the game ever ran on. But I do not have access to it and I'm not sure if I will. But if I do I plan to make videos or something."

He also showed screenshots for another cancelled game he worked on called Capcom Generations that ran on the same game engine.

In December 2022 Chris got the hardware to work and uploaded the gameplay footage running on it and stated he will upload more footage at some point.

Gallery

On the Hunt

Screenshots

Footage

Gameplay footage uploaded by Chris Tang.

Videos

LSuperSonicQ's video on the subject.

LSuperSonicQ's follow-up video on the subject.

References