The Cutting Room Floor (website)


The Cutting Room Floor is a website dedicated to the cataloguing of unused and debugging content in video games. The site and its discoveries have been referenced in the gaming press.
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.

History

The Cutting Room Floor was started by Robert Flory in 2002 as part of a blog. It mainly focused on Nintendo Entertainment System games and was occasionally updated. In the late 2000s, Alex Workman, better known as Xkeeper, reworked the site into a wiki, which launched on 2 February 2010. The site has since specialised in what gaming media have likened to video game archaeology: its members analyse video game code and content using various tools and if something interesting is found, an "uncover" starts. According to Xkeeper, the site's members co-operatively analyse their findings to work out how to use content. The site's goal is to catalogue "as many deleted elements as possible from all sorts of games".
In December 2013, Edge considered The Cutting Room Floor to be the largest and best-organised catalogue of unused video game content. Around this time, the site had 3712 articles. In June 2016, Xkeeper said that the website has largely avoided copyright issues.
Amongst the more noted discoveries are the secret menus in the Mortal Kombat games, and The Legend of Zelda prototype. The Cutting Room Floors community are reported to have paid 700 dollars for an unreleased Nintendo DS Tetris prototype. A coding error in Super Mario Bros. that changed the behaviour of the Spiny eggs also made the gaming press. In May 2018, Kotaku and Eurogamer reported on a Pokémon Gold and Silver prototype and its assets that had been discovered and documented on the website.
Other material catalogued include hidden messages and regional and revisional differences.