Saturn Port of Prize Fighter Uploaded to Internet Archive

Josh Fairhurst, former owner of Limited Run Games , has released the prototype Saturn of full-motion video game Prize Fighter onto the Internet Archive.

The archive includes both the North American and Japanese prototypes of the two-disc game as well as a PDF of the North American version’s manual.

“Heads up!” Fairhurst said today on Bluesky. “When I acquired the rights to the Digital Pictures game library, [ Screaming Villains ] and I found the unreleased SEGA Saturn version of Prize Fighter Heavyweight Edition. It’s now been preserved online and can be downloaded for free.”

Screaming Villains is a company that’s released modern ports of other Digital Pictures games, including Prize Fighter, which went on sale on the PlayStation 4 and 5 as well as PC via Steam nearly two weeks ago. Prize Fighter’s modern ports were announced last fall with the same subtitle the Saturn port would have had, “Heavyweight Edition.”

Prize Fighter: Heavyweight Edition is OUT NOW on Steam & PS5/PS4 pic.twitter.com/P1DKZjE08A

“As far as we’re able to tell this is a fully playable gold master and would have matched the retail release,” Fairhurst said on X . “I believe this was canceled shortly before it was supposed to go to press, after Acclaim bankrupted Digital Pictures.”

Digital Pictures specialized in games that heavily featured full-motion video. It released more than a dozen titles on the Sega CD in 1992 through ’94. It created two ports — Corpse Killer and Double Switch — and one original game — Quarterback Attack — for the Saturn in 1995.

It was in the process of porting Prize Fighter to the Saturn while working on another new game, Maximum Surge, when the company ran out of money and laid off its staff in early 1996.

The existence of a working Saturn build of Prize Fighter dates back to footage displayed at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo in 2015 before new footage was uploaded to YouTube in 2022, as SHIRO! reported at the time.

The YouTube footage was uploaded by Todd McHenry, who said at the time, “This was built with original backups from the mid 1990s of the source files so there wasn’t any physical media involved so I guess technically it has been ‘dumped.’ No public release just yet and unfortunately has to stay in limbo for a little bit longer. Hopefully maybe soon.”

McHenry converted the backups to a playable format after his acquaintance Tyler Hogle at Screaming Villains found them in the first place.

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Earlier today, McHenry posted in the MiSTer Discord server ‘s Saturn core discussion about today’s Internet Archive release.

“I posted here a couple year[s] ago that we found the unreleased Prize Fighter for Sega Saturn. It is now up on Internet Archive,” he said. “It’s semi-official. As official as it can be as Josh who owns the rights to these games now gave us the go ahead to release it. Runs great on hardware and the MiSTer core. Can’t say the game is great. But it’s nice to finally not be sitting on this.”

McHenry went on to say that the release coincides with modern ports’ launch.

“But also Josh Fairhurst is [a] pretty recent owner of all the Digital Pictures stuff and it’s only come up recently in conversation like ‘hey, we should release this,'” McHenry said.

The previous rights holder of Digital Pictures games, Flash Film Works, announced last September that it had sold the rights to Josh Fairhurst. The accompanying image was a collage of Digital Pictures game covers, including the Sega CD version of Prize Fighter and the Saturn version of Maximum Surge.

On the SHIRO! Facebook page , Tyler Hogle replied to a Saturn fan happy with today’s Prize Fighter archival by saying, “We have a Saturn and PC build of Maximum Surge too.”

When asked about whether there are plans to upload Maximum Surge to the Internet Archive, Hogle said, “we’ve definitely talked about it.”

“We’re just waiting until we get closer to the remastered version before we do anything with it,” he said. “There’s a few other things that were found too but as far as unreleased Saturn games go Prize Fighter and Maximum Surge is it.”

Josh Fairhurst added some more detail on Bluesky : “Screaming Villains is working on a remaster of Maximum Surge, but that will likely drop after all the other Digital Pictures remasters since it’s a little more complex. We have all the film and code, though, so it will be fully accurate to how the game would’ve played had it released in 96.”

SHIRO!’s own PandaMonium intends to cover the Saturn port of Double Switch, as well as the history of Digital Pictures, in the next video in his series of Saturn game reviews on YouTube.

	Danthrax
		Danthrax is a member of the SHIRO! Media Group, writing stories for the website when Saturn news breaks and helping to manage the group's social media accounts. While he was a Sega Genesis kid in the '90s, he didn't get a Saturn until 2018. It didn't take him long to fall in love with the console's library as well as the fan translation and homebrew scene. He contributed heavily to the Bulk Slash and Stellar Assault SS fan localizations, and he's helped as an editor on several other Saturn and Dreamcast fan projects such as Cotton 2, Rainbow Cotton and Sakura Wars Columns 2.