Forum user sreak from dreamcast-talk.com has just found a Dreamcast dev kit and dumped the contents of the hard drive. The highlight of the contents found is a tech demo of an unreleased game based on the TV series The Simpsons, called “Bug Squad”. It appears to be a game where you play from the perspective of a bug in the Simpson’s house.
The game was created by Scotland-based Red Lemon Studios and the find was confirmed by former employee Dr Andy Campbell; One of the coders on their team had created a cell shading engine for the Dreamcast they apparently nicknamed the “toon render engine”. Back in October 2000, they created a tech demo showcasing what it could do and Dr Campell leveraged his contacts at Fox to pitch them the demo. This game was never picked up and presumably all that’s left of it is what was found on this drive.
Below is the full list of software found. Check out the forum thread for more info, as they comb through the remaining files: https://www.dreamcast-talk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=13763
- BlowUp
- roach
- Bugsquad
- Quake2
- Simpsons
- ttb410
- RoachWorld
- ttb5
- Source code
Oh my! Not seen that for 20 years! We had a great coder who had developed an amazing cell shading engine for DC. I knew Fox pretty well, so this was a demo we created and I pitched to them. We were never commissioned, so this was technically never an official title in development
— Dr Andy Campbell (@spacebrodie) December 20, 2020
