Clipping content is an inevitability in video game creation. A studio can generate a million ideas over the course of a five-year development cycle, but as the release date approaches, casualties begin to pile up. Storylines are dropped, concept art never makes it into code, stories are truncated, mechanics are abstracted and simplified, and years later creative leaders conduct interviews about their persistent white whales – the grand aspirations negotiated to meet a deadline, or good ideas just repeated because they didn’t make sense for that particular game.
The people obsessed with clipped content tend to be the most diehard fans of a specific franchise. It’s hard for a layman like me to get really fascinated by, say, a discarded ax model in Skyrim. Lots of clipped content is commonplace.
But there are other rarer cut-content artifacts that flare up with intrigue and implications as modders dig up the code for us all to see. Perhaps they indicate an enticing gameplay direction that a development team was experimenting with, or perhaps we’re getting evidence of a more satisfying narrative coda that was sadly watered down by time constraints or managerial interference.
This list focuses on the clipped content that tickles our imaginations with the painful, undying question of what if. That’s the funny thing about clipped content: those unfilled gaps allow a video game to live forever.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2
It’s honestly quite shocking how buggy Knights of the Old Republic 2 was at launch, given the amount of content that spilled onto the cutting room floor. The RPG is celebrated by a voracious band of fans for its staunch portrayal of the flawed morality at the heart of Star Wars fiction, but you’re also likely to encounter broken sidequests, bizarre soft-locks, and frequent crashes.
Fortunately, an ardent modding community has fixed some of those issues while also restoring the game’s abandoned sequences. You can explore a hellish production planet, completely controlled by droids, where the infamous HK robots came from. The endings have been completely reworked, including extended epilogues featuring some of the game’s more memorable characters. (Darth Sion, in particular, gets a dignified farewell.)
There’s a parallel universe where Knights of the Old Republic 2 sparked a venerable renaissance of Star Wars myths; breaking the universe in all sorts of fascinating, twisted ways. Unfortunately for us, we can only break through the rubble.
Fallout: New Vegas
No, we’re not done with obsidian yet. The studio is responsible for some of the most celebrated PC RPGs of all time, and many of them are absolutely riddled with loose threads dangling in the source code. Example: you can use a one hour compilation of clipped Fallout: New Vegas content on YouTube as fans reanimated cutscenes, enemies, quest lines, and hidden items on the disc. Much of this stuff is in remarkably good condition, which makes it all the more surprising that it’s not over the top. Fortunately, New Vegas has one of the most passionate modding scenes in the hobby, so if you want to play the unabridged version of Obsidian’s calling card, you’re only a few patches away from getting that done.
Metal Gear Solid V is one of the best action games of all time. Kojima set aside the whimsical, eccentric counter-intuitiveness that defined the earlier games in the series in favor of a bountiful sandbox full of incredible spy hairstyles. (You can blow your arm off like a rocket, blast it through a window, and knock a guard out cold. Game of the Year.)
That said, if you’ve played the game, you might feel that the storytelling verges on nonsensical – which can be partly attributed to Kojima’s acrimonious departure from Konami during development. Eagle-eyed Modders, of course, have found a long cutscene, deep in the game’s code, that points to a decisive confrontation with the ever-and-future Liquid Snake, which would bring several ambiguities in what is Big Boss’ departure for now. It’s honestly a little baffling that it didn’t make it to the finish line, especially for a saga as beloved as Metal Gear. Let Kojima cook!
Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
Jedi Academy is highly regarded in PC circles, being the first game to teach us how much fun boxing fights can be with mouse and keyboard. It’s great to throw your friends into molten lava with the force of the force, but that would be it even cooler if you could do that while piloting an X-Wing. Aspyr clearly felt the same way, as spelunkers discovered a semi-functional X-Wing lingering deep within the game’s files. Did the famous chaotic battles of the Jedi Academy ever include intergalactic dogfights, like a prototype of the future Star Wars Battlefront? My palms are sweating just thinking about it.
Star Wars Battlefront 2
Speaking of which, Star Wars Battlefront 2, like so many other triple-A games in the 21st century, entered our lives thanks to some insanely bad vibes. The game was plagued by flesh-eating loot boxes just as the gaming public had finally grown tired of the industry’s gambling addiction, giving way to a lengthy EA apology tour. As the years passed, Battlefront 2 morphed into, arguably, the definitive Star Wars video game, fusing all the disparate elements of the universe – from the lamentable prequels to the questionable sequels – into one proudly expansive package.
The funny thing? Battlefront 2 could also have been a lot bigger. Voice lines in the files insinuate that EA once considered hero units like Ahsoka and Padme. I find the last entry particularly interesting, if only because Padme seems like a no-brainer for any major Star Wars project. I like the idea that she has a special ability related to her sonorous, senatorial diction. A potential Battlefront 3 seems like an opportunity right now, but I’m still hopeful.
LA Noire
If you’ve been following video games for a long time, then you might remember the massive controversy surrounding the release of LA Noire. The game was the product of frequent crunch, which was brazen enough to make headlines long before labor issues in studios were a point of major scrutiny. (That’s saying something!) And yet all that overtime still left a lot of content on the cutting room floor. Brendan McNamara, the director of LA Noire, said 11 missions – related to fraud and burglary – had been planned and halted as deadlines approached.
Banjo Kazooie
I know Banjo-Kazooie isn’t a PC game, but this story is so weird I think it deserves to be included. In the second world of Rare’s eternally beloved platform game, Treasure Trove Cove, you can find a weird little mausoleum with a matrix of letters on the floor. It didn’t seem to serve any real purpose – it didn’t seem to be a cornerstone of a puzzle or an Easter egg – until a few Banjo-Kazooie megafans discovered that you could use this matrix to enter long, elaborate codes that would allow players to unlock a handful of mysterious collectibles left in the game files. Within the Banjo-Kazooie lexicon, these collectibles were referred to as “Stop ‘N Swop” items, and they are the bones of a scrapped feature that was intended to connect the original game to its sequel, Banjo-Tooie.
The idea was that you would get one of those items in Banjo-Kazooie, fire up your Nintendo 64, replace the cartridge with Tooie, and access an extra perk in the sequel to reward your hustle. This was a bold engineering venture in the late 1990s – how exactly would an offline, 64-bit console retain data after a reset? – so it probably shouldn’t be surprising that the mechanic was eventually abandoned. And yet, decades later, Rare finally went ahead with the Stop ‘N Swop feature after the release of Banjo-Kazooie on Xbox Live Arcade. Collect the Stop ‘N Swop items in the Microsoft version and you’ll unlock a few doodads in the underrated, barely remembered Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts. I can only imagine that on the fateful day Banjo-Threeie hits our hard drives, we’ll be Stop ‘N Swopping through countless cosmetic skins, all ranked by rarity. The end is near!