If there's one movie character synonymous with the heavy action scenes of the 1980's, it's the Terminator. Arnold Schwarzenegger's seminal role was a defining part of the decade, and even today hasn't faded from cultural relevance, with a Terminator DLC in Mortal Kombat 11 having recently leaked, and the character confirmed as DLC for Ghost Recon Breakpoint and Gears 5. However, the Terminator has had some projects get canceled or altered, including an NES game from developer Sunsoft that never saw the light of day - until now.

In 1990, Sunsoft released a game called Journey to Silius, a generic action platformer for the NES. However, the story runs a little deeper than that, as the title was originally intended to be a Terminator game, which Sunsoft acquired the license to from Creative Licensing Corporation, or CLC, in 1988. Sunsoft showed off the game in a promo video at Las Vegas' WCES in 1989, when the game was still relatively early in development. The promo video was dug up by Gaming Alexandria and is the only known footage of the project.

Later in 1989, the finished game was shown off to CLC's founder, Rand Marlis, who then revoked the license due to the game not following the movie's plot. The game largely took place in the future, where the movie itself mainly takes place in the past as the Terminator attempts to find and kill Sarah Connor. Without the license, Sunsoft was unable to publish it as a Terminator game and had to convert it into Journey to Silius, simply swapping out the cut-scenes to pass it off as something else.

The footage itself is relatively mundane compared to the marketing talk within the promo, at least when viewed through a modern lens. It's funny to see just how much games have evolved since the '80s and '90s, especially Terminator, who will have a much more modern look in Ghost Recon: Break Point and Gears 5 in the future.

What's more interesting is how many other games likely suffered the same fate in the early days of the industry. Licensed games were a much bigger deal back then, though they had sharp variations of quality, with Atari's E.T. game famously generating enough fan backlash to crash the entire games industry and eventually leading to a documentary where thousands of buried copies were dug up in the desert.

Source: Gaming Alexandria