Lost Genesis/Mega-Drive RTS from Sega Technical Institute, Dark Empires, recovered and preserved

Another unreleased Genesis game long thought lost has now been found and preserved thanks to The Hidden Palace.

Dark Empires, which was being worked on alongside Kid Chameleon at Sega Technical Institute in 1990, got cancelled in order to get the studio to work on Sonic the Hedgehog 2 instead, as we had learned thanks to The Video Game History Foundation back in 2023. While Kid Chameleon made it to store shelves, Dark Empires wasn’t far enough along to get in the hands of Genesis/Mega-Drive owners everywhere. Thankfully, former STI artist Craig Stitt had found a pre-release copy of Dark Empires among his personal archives and shared it with Hidden Palace.

Interested in learning more? You can see more after the break, including the link to download the prototype.

Dark Empires was to be an RTS (Real-Time Strategy) game, something that was very uncommon on consoles at the time. The game was directly inspired by Technosoft’s classic Genesis RTS game, Herzog Zwei. It was being worked on by people who would be important figures in Sonic the Hedgehog 2’s development, including STI head Mark Cerny and artist Craig Stitt, who also worked on Segapede. In the end, though, Mark Cerny prioritized Sonic the Hedgehog 2 after deciding that RTS games on consoles would be too niche of a game to market. It would most likely have come out in 1991, which is also when Sonic the Hedgehog and Kid Chameleon released.

The prototype is now available to download for free on Hidden Palace so you can see for yourself what could have been.

Because the game is a prototype, there’s still a lot of fleshing out to do that the game never had, but you can at least get a feel for the gameplay and marvel at the fantasy artwork making up the game’s presentation, which Stitt was responsible for. The prototype also contains no music at all, as no one had begun work on this yet. According to Stitt, the company might have contracted a musician outside of STI to handle the score.

Along with sharing the prototype rom, Hidden Palace also spoke to Craig Stitt and prepared a long writeup on the history of Dark Empires’s development, documenting his many recollections and sharing some of his original concept art for the game. It’s an excellent read that gives a lot of context on how STI conducted business at the time, what inspired Dark Empires, and what happened after the game was cancelled. You can check it out right here.

What do you think of Dark Empires? Did you check out the prototype? Does it look like something you would’ve wanted to play in the early 90’s or even now? Lets hear what you think in the comments below.

And if you enjoyed Craig Stitt’s artwork for Dark Empires, you can see a lot more of his original artwork in an archived collection at The Video Game History Foundation.

EDIT: Apparently, Judy Totoya, the character designer best known for creating Miles “Tails” Prower, had worked on Dark Empires as well. According to him, this prototype rom even includes a bit of his own art.

According to Totoya, development on Dark Empires went into full swing after Kid Chameleon (which released in Japan as “Chameleon Kid”) had wrapped up its development. That would explain why Dark Empires was so far from a completed state by 1991 and also adds further context to why they had to cancel it to move their resources over to Sonic the Hedgehog 2. That’s also when Totoya joined the Dark Empires team right before he got moved over to Sonic 2’s team.

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