Armed, also referred to as Aftermath, was to be a game released on the Sega Saturn and PlayStation towards the end of 1996. Developed by Point of View and originally to be published by Interplay, Armed had you playing as a special agent named Vic as he blasted robots and bad guys in the future.
It was to be a very hard-hitting game as far as visuals and audio were concerned, featuring fully texture-mapped renderings of the characters and backgrounds as well as plenty of FMV. Even though it featured in magazines at the time and also at E3 (skip to 2:44), this exciting sounding side-scroller never made it to fruition. For reasons unknown, it was canned very close to release.
Last week, however, a prototype version of Armed surfaced on eBay for the pricey sum of US$2500 – and surprisingly (well, to me anyway – and no doubt anyone else who considers 2.5K to be a lot of moolah) someone actually bought it. Sold on a Sega Saturn branded CD-R with no label, the seller included photo proof of it working. They also stated that while this version was missing music and cutscenes at certain points, it was completely playable from beginning to end.
Fear not if you were looking forward to playing Armed yourself, however, as a ROM was made available on the Assembler Games forums the same day it sold. It’s not specified if this ROM was dumped from the same copy – although, the timing seems to indicate that it was (or it’s one heck of a coincidence). Regardless, it’s nice that this previously lost game can now be played without forking over the equivalent of a few month’s worth of rent.
Growing up while the fifth generation of consoles reigned supreme meant that Brendan missed out on much of the 80’s and early 90’s of gaming the first time around. He either lacked the cognitive ability to play them, as naturally, he was a baby - or he simply didn’t exist yet. Undeterred, Brendan started a blog called Retro Game On in 2011. This followed his exploits as he collected and played everything he could get his hands on no matter what the release date. While RGO is mainly YouTube focused these days concentrating on video reviews and historical features, the itch to do some old fashion writing never went away. More recently, Brendan has been a staff writer for the gaming website, GameCloud, mostly focusing on the indie gaming scene in his locale of Perth, Australia.
