Until yesterday, a Japanese video game called Labyrinthe was thought to be lost forever. Around 67GB of unreleased games have been discovered in a private folder called “DO NOT UPLOAD”.
The games were part of a private collection and because they have now been made more widely available, any further unreleased games may never see the light of day. Understandably, private collectors don’t like having their libraries of lost games made readily available to the public so this release is likely to have repercussions.
For now though, games like Labyrinthe are available as ROMs for you to play. Released in 1998, this is the third and rarest instalment of the Horror Tour series of games. The game has a listing on Amazon Japan but has never been in stock, prompting a 2014 post on Hardcore Gamer to wonder whether the game was ever released at all.
Prequels of the game have also been difficult to find. The Horror Tour series was available to play on PC and Sega Saturn and in the game players are trapped in the confines of a castle where you must solve puzzles to proceed and inevitably kill the evil demon Zeddas. The second instalment was released only in Japan for PC and ended on a cliffhanger, leaving gamers desperate to know what happens for two decades.
The ‘DO NOT UPLOAD’ folder also contained titles such as Cookie’s Bustle, Yellow Brick Road, and Link Devicer 2074 but according to a screenshot, the private collector threatened to pull the entire folder of content from the directory and to stop uploading games completely if anyone leaked Labyrinthe.