Genkai Chōsen Distopia (lost unreleased arcade action game; 1994)

The title screen of the game.

Status: Lost

Genkai Chōsen Distopia was an arcade game slated for a 1994 release. Distopia is a two-player, side-scrolling action game with a post-apocalyptic setting full of monsters, killing some of which would drop coins.

History

Genkai Chōsen Distopia was developed by Toaplan from late 1993 to early 1994, and was nearly completed according to Toaplan member Tatsuya Uemura. However, with Toaplan in financial trouble, the company went bankrupt and the game went nowhere. It is unknown who composed the music to Distopia.

Availability

In 2016, former MAME contributor Eric "ShouTime" Chung tried to find a copy of Distopia, only to discover that the copy was being hoarded by someone anonymous, much to his chagrin. However, given Chung's migration to MAME from exA-Arcadia, only time will tell if anyone else is willing to dump and upload the game. There have also been a few guesses that there were Toaplan PCBs in the warehouse of Face (an even more obscure defunct video game company), and that Distopia was included in their stash.

In July 2019, Twitter user @ulchan2 went digging through VHS tapes and unearthed a video of Distopia supplied by Toaplan staff. The video shows off the attract mode, the character and map select screens, and part of the first level. A shorter clip within that same source was found in January 2020, showing the character Fiana entering a level, but the level doesn't seem to be finished as it gets instantly cleared, showing Fiana's victory pose and the bonus score tally.

In May 2022, Twitter user @hatimituxiaoyu leaked the design documents for some planned Toaplan games that walked the plank, including Distopia. The posts weren't done as a thread, though.

In June 2022, Game Developer Research Institute (GDRI) discovered that the rights to Distopia were held by Gazelle in 1996, one of the companies where former Toaplan staff migrated after the bankruptcy, but Gazelle did not release it.