The Cutting Room Floor (TCRF) is a website dedicated to the cataloguing of unused content and leftover debugging material in video games. The site and its discoveries have been referenced in the gaming press.
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Type of site | Wiki |
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Founder(s) | Rachel Mae |
Key people | Xkeeper[1] |
URL | tcrf.net |
Launched | 2002; 22 years ago (2002) (original form) 2 February 2010; 14 years ago (2010-02-02) (current form) |
Content licence | CC BY 3.0 |
The site started out as part of a blog but was reworked and relaunched as a wiki in 2010. The reworked site is considered by Edge to be a major catalogue of unused video game content.
The Cutting Room Floor was started by Rachel Mae[2] in 2002 as part of a blog.[1] It mainly focused on Nintendo Entertainment System games,[3] and was occasionally updated.[1] In the late 2000s, Alex Workman, better known as Xkeeper, reworked the site into a wiki, which launched on 2 February 2010.[3] The site has since specialised in what gaming media, including Edge and Wired,[1][4] have likened to video game archaeology;[5][6][7] Kotaku described them as "routinely responsible" for it.[8] Its members analyse video game code and content using various tools, such as debuggers and hex editors,[1] and if something interesting is found, an "uncover" starts.[5] According to Xkeeper, the site's members co-operatively analyse their findings to work out how to re-enable content.[5] The site's goal is to catalogue "as many deleted elements as possible from all sorts of games".[9]
In December 2013, Edge considered The Cutting Room Floor to be the largest and best-organised catalogue of unused video game content.[1] Around this time, the site had 3,712 articles.[1] In June 2016, Xkeeper said that the website has largely avoided copyright issues.[5] Amongst the more noted discoveries are the secret menus in the Mortal Kombat games,[8][10][11] and The Legend of Zelda prototype, which was "extensively" catalogued and what The Cutting Room Floor moderator GoldS considers the site's most important article.[1][5][12] The Cutting Room Floor's community is reported to have paid 700 dollars for an unreleased Tetris DS prototype.[5] A coding error in Super Mario Bros. that changed the behaviour of the Spiny eggs also made the gaming press.[13] In May 2018, Kotaku and Eurogamer reported on a Pokémon Gold and Silver prototype and its assets that had been documented on the website.[14][15] Other material catalogued include hidden messages,[4] as well as regional and revisional differences, such as differences between versions and ports.[16]