In March 2020, a grey plastic prototype — the Nintendo PlayStation, a console that was never supposed to exist — sold at auction for $360,000, the most expensive unreleased gaming artifact ever sold. It was never released, never played by the public, and very nearly thrown away.Behind that record sale stands a graveyard of brilliant games that never made it out. Silent Hills, the Kojima–del Toro horror masterpiece cancelled in a corporate power struggle. Star Wars 1313, killed the day Disney bought Lucasfilm. Scalebound, axed after years of hype. The Sega Pluto and the Atari Cosmos, entire consoles that died before launch. Resident Evil 1.5, 60–80% complete and scrapped because producer Shinji Mikami judged it unscary and uninspired.Lost Levels treats cancelled games and unreleased hardware as what they are — cultural history with a collector's heartbeat — and it is the only book that combines cancelled-game history with verified prototype valuations. Across 16 chapters and 61 entries, you get the true stories of the games and machines that died: why they were cancelled, what they would have been, and what their surviving artifacts are worth today.You'll learn the seven ways a game gets cancelled, from creative reboots to licensing deaths; tour Nintendo's lost generation and Sega's Saturn tragedy; visit the prototype underground where builds leak and trade hands; meet the preservation movement saving gaming's history one dump at a time; and discover the afterlife of repro carts, fan restorations, and translations. A full chapter decodes the prototype collector's market itself — the record sales, the forces that drive prices, and how to read them honestly.Every claim in this book carries a verdict: CONFIRMED, REPORTED, or RUMORED — so you always know how much weight to give it. Every collector value is a verified, date-stamped public auction result — never a guess, never an asking price, never a rumor dressed up as data.Whether you're a retro gaming fan who lived through these eras, a collector hunting prototypes and repro carts, or a student of how the video game industry really works, Lost Levels is the definitive record of the games history almost forgot — and the only book that answers the question every collector asks: what is this prototype actually worth?
