Cancelled Woody Woodpecker Racing Dreamcast port saved and archived

The Sega Dreamcast had a handful of interesting kart racing games in its time, but here’s one that never made it past the finish line to retail shelves. Woody Woodpecker Racing was released for PlayStation, PC, and Game Boy Color, but a Dreamcast version was also planned, as evidenced by the above ad from the manual for the Dreamcast version of The Grinch video game, also from Konami.

Now, thanks to video game archivist and Youtuber Andrew Borman and video game developer @frioglobal1, the source code for Woody Woodpecker Racing on Dreamcast has been found and miraculously compiled into a functional form. Thanks to them, we now have a glimpse of what this game could’ve looked like. Check in after the break to see more.

Above, you can see footage of the canned Dreamcast version of this game running as a brief glimpse of what you could expect from it. It’s important to stress that no completed software of the game was found, only the source code and the majority of game assets. According to @frioglobal1, he had to carefully look at this code to figure out what exact tools were used in the Dreamcast port’s construction. When he figured that out, he was able to create a working version of the game using his own Sega Katana Development kit. This compiled game runs perfectly well on real Dreamcast hardware and on the Dreamcast emulator Flycast. He details his whole process in a twitter thread, in case you’d like to read about his process in greater detail.

As of this writing, the game is not available for download, but regardless, another long lost piece of Dreamcast history has been preserved. Even if the game was never destined to be amazing, it is nice to see the effort that hardworking developers put into bringing something new for Dreamcast owners to play out there. Of course, we still don’t know exactly why the Dreamcast game was cancelled. We can only assume that Konami decided to shut it down following Sega’s announcement that they were leaving the console race, considering when the game was likely due to release.

So what do you think of this newly preserved find? Do you think Woody Woodpecker Racing would’ve been a highlight on Dreamcast? Have you played any of the versions of the game that did complete development? What other known cancelled Sega games would you like to see found? Let us know in the comments below.

If you wanna read about another cancelled game for a Sega console, which also has a much richer history, check out my article on The Sacred Pools.

aMsPdMic k HAd: