Who doesn’t love a good ol’ piece of lost media, especially when it comes to video games? To be privy to details surrounding a piece of media that for some reason or another was never sold to the public is exciting to say the least. Seeing what could have been had an unreleased game being given the chance to stand on its own makes for a weird, almost nostalgic kind of feeling – like glimpsing into the childhood of a person from a world that doesn’t exist.
The same can be said about Pickles, the supposed unreleased Nintendo GameCube game from around 2005. Footage from the game shared online shows a monkey on a unicycle making its way around a jetty of some sort with all kinds of obstacles getting in the way. However, is the game actually a real unfinished game from the mid 2000s? Or is it the latest ARG to hit the internet?
It looks like a genuine game with familiar gameplay that you’d expect to see from games of the time, for example, the camera seems to track the character with no input from the player, most games nowadays give players control over camera movements even in third person games. On top of that, this wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen a monkey using unconventional means of transport on the GameCube, after all, Super Monkey Ball was one of the console’s most popular games at the time this game supposedly came out, so it checks out that developers at the time would be trying to publish similar ideas to capitalize on the craze.
The footage in question was shared by Twitter user Cake_Hoarder, who also posted his findings to TikTok. He gives us a little more information about the game telling us how the beta testing worked at the time, which explains how he has access to the game. Essentially he’s playing the game on an NR reader version of the GameCube. So what’s an NR reader? Essentially the NR reader is a piece of development kit that allows for the play-testing of unpublished games. Beta versions of games are put onto disks that can only be read by certain hardware. The NR reader is one of them according to sites like Nesworld.
So that explains how Cake_Hoarder got his hands on the game, right? Sounds legit, but there is also evidence in the video itself that backs up the poster’s claims about the game being real. The main piece of evidence occurs toward the end of the video in which the player moves the character over a fence and into an area with a bunch of barrels. Written on the wall above is some text that reads “Santa Cruz Games,” a quick Google will bring up a Wikipedia page for the game, showing that the company has worked on a number of games but nothing too well known.
So that all seems pretty legit. We’ve got footage of the game using hardware that has been confirmed as a developer tool and now we know the company behind the creation of Pickles, so that about wraps that up. It’s a real game, case closed, Cake_Hoarder has even promised to dump the game online for all to play.
But something just doesn’t seem right.
Whilst some viewers on TikTok were pretty amazed by the new find, others were more skeptical, with a few claiming that this looked like a new ARG.
“Calling it now, this is an ARG”
“This is screaming ARG”
Some are speculating that this is the beginning of a new internet ARG. If you don’t know what an ARG is, it stands for Alternate Reality Game. They usually play out on the internet and mix fact with fiction as well as requiring those who are playing to do a little digging into the subject. Often they involve elements of horror – like the classic Dear David twitter ARG from years back. Anyhow, something’s telling me this is an ARG of some sort, so I did a little digging.
If you look at Santa Cruz’s wikipedia page; it just seems off. Firstly, the page is a stub, which is the word Wikipedia uses for articles on the site that are either too short or missing information. Well, the page for these developers is definitely missing some info. All we get is that the company was a games developer based in Santa Cruz, California, along with a list of games they developed.
If you go to any of the games listed and look for Santa Cruz games mentioned on the page, you will find it, but Wikipedia can be edited by literally anyone so I’m personally not buying that these guys really exist just yet. If you go to the official developer site listed on the Wikipedia page, you’ll be taken to a weird tribute site that is almost mourning the end of Santa Cruz Games, (supposedly they shut down in 2010.) Morbid messages like “Thank you for attending the funeral” appear all over the site.
Ok it’s odd but there’s not a lot of info to be obtained from the site, at least not from what I could see. Does this prove my theory? Not exactly, but let’s move on. What about the NR reader – the piece of hardware that gave Cake_Hoarder access to the game in the first place? Well, there actually isn’t a lot of information out there on the internet about them, the previously mentioned ‘Nesworld’ site gives me strange vibes, like it’s trying too hard to look retro. There’s no date that can be seen for when the page was published, but aside from that the rest of the site seems to function normally. Perhaps I’m just reading too far into this now.
Honestly, the biggest red flag about this whole thing is that the game, its developers, and every site that corroborates its existence seems to have come from nowhere. Underneath Cake_Hoarder’s tweet are screenshots posted by another user showing an article from the website Gamasutra (yeah, another website that doesn’t sound familiar). Checking out that site will take you to ‘game developer,’ a website that supposedly used to be Gamasutra before the decision was made to re-brand to a less sexually suggestive name.
Once again, it’s more unverified sources claiming that this game is real. But is it actually real? Under every post made about this game is people talking about remembering the 2006 demo, or being shown the game before, but if so many people know about it, why isn’t there more info readily available online? My gut is telling me that this is in fact an ARG, but I don’t have the know-how to dig deeper. If you’re interested in going down the rabbit-hole yourself, hopefully this article will provide a good starting point for you. Either way, I’m sure we’ll get more answers soon enough.