Atari Games · Arcade · 1996 · Cancelled during location testing; ROM dumped
The dinosaur-brawler sequel that was cancelled in the middle of arcade location tests, surviving only on a single public cabinet and, eventually, a purpose-built emulator.
Atari Games began Primal Rage II in 1996 as a follow-up to its popular stop-motion dinosaur fighting game, this time shifting to human "avatar" warriors imbued with the beasts’ powers. Development never got far: months into the project, Atari Games was absorbed by Midway, and the sequel was cancelled on the grounds that it would not sell well enough. A handful of prototype cabinets had already been placed in arcades for location testing — notably at Golfland arcades in California — and these test units are all that saved the game. One surviving cabinet, running version 0.36 (only about a third of the intended content), resides at the Galloping Ghost Arcade in Illinois. The prototype’s ROM data was eventually dumped, and an enthusiast built a custom MAME variant, "MAME4RAGE2," so that anyone could finally play the lost sequel at home.