Scooby-Doo: Horror on the High Seas (found prologue of Cartoon Network online game; 2004)
Title screen for the first chapter, The Ghost Pirate Attacks!.
Status: Found
Date found: 21 Feb 2021
Found by: Ganonthegreat, LoganTheHammer, and Hobqueer
Horror on the High Seas was a Flash adventure/puzzle game originally launched on Warner Bros' Scooby-Doo website as part of a general promotion push for Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed. Divided into four chapters, it tasked players with guiding Scooby-Doo and Shaggy through ships and undersea caves to escape - and ultimately capture - a "ghost" pirate who had attacked their cruise liner. Each segment of gameplay was bridged with a short cutscene, written and voiced by the crew of the then-airing What's New, Scooby-Doo? cartoon.[1]
While all four episodes of the game itself are available on a number of game-archive sites (often under the name "Scoobydoo Adventure"), and play-throughs are ubiquitous on YouTube, what remains lost is the "prologue" cutscene to the first chapter. This provides background for why Scooby and Shaggy are on the line (Daphne's father had provided the cruise tickets), as well as why Fred, Daphne, and Velma are absent (exploring an old castle in Transylvania).
This prologue is apparently unavailable in all currently-accessible versions of the game, which utilize a later version set up by the WB website; in the original version, it played automatically, before the game's intro screen.
On February 21st, 2021, LMW users Ganonthegreat, LoganTheHammer, and Hobqueer found the .swf file for the game's prologue from a previously unknown version of the game. The link to this version of the game was found on a Polish gaming website's review of the game.
Subsequent Games
In subsequent years, the Scooby-Doo website saw two more multi-episode games in this vein; Mayan Mayhem and Haunts For the Holidays. No content is known to be lost for either (the former's prologue was treated as a completely separate installment from its episodes proper, and is archived as an individual game on several sites).
External Links
- Video of the prologue. Retrieved 21 Feb '21
- Wayback Machine's earliest capture of the game. This version appears to have the cutscene in it. Retrieved 21 Feb '21
- Wayback Machine's earliest capture of the old Scooby-Doo site's game page; most links dead-end. Retrieved 15 Dec '20
- Collection of YouTube playthroughs for the game, some with direct links. Retrieved 15 Dec '20