Gaming historians have uncovered and published prototype versions of The Sacred Pools, Sega's multimillion dollar live-action erotic thriller.
If you haven't heard of The Sacred Pools, you're certainly not alone. The project was in development at SegaSoft, a US Sega subsidiary established to create games that could be aimed at adult audiences and released across multiple platforms, including PC and PlayStation.
Gaming Alexandria has a lengthy rundown of the history around The Sacred Pools, but in short, it publicly debuted at E3 1996, long after players had come to realize that full-motion video games were generally pretty miserable. After a shameful response from the press it quickly shuffled into obscurity and was never seen again. Early promotional videos leaned heavily on the revealing costumes worn by the women in the cast, and magazines of the era started calling it an "erotic thriller" that presaged Sega's journey into "adult" games.
The reality, of course, is that The Sacred Pools is about as sexy as the infamous Night Trap (which Sega also published, incidentally, though it was developed externally), which is to say, not sexy at all. There's no nudity - at least not beyond the strategically-obscured nude woman on the cover art - and the game seems to play basically like any FMV adventure game.
The developers that Gaming Alexandria managed to track down report that the game had a budget between $2 and $3 million - a pretty astounding price tag for the era. The game does at least have nice production design, depending on your tolerance for unmitigated camp in your sci-fi and fantasy.
The Sacred Pools has now been preserved thanks to Gaming Alexandria and associate producer David Gray, who's hung onto the prototype discs since 1999.
You can download the PC, Saturn, and PlayStation prototypes of The Sacred Pools on Archive.org, and they should be playable on most appropriate emulators.
Check out our Immortality review if you want to know what good, modern FMV gaming can look like.
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