'Spyro 3' NPCs Tell Him To "P*ss Off" In New Prototype Footage

Spyro: Year of the Dragon is considered to be the culmination of the Spyro series, and not only for the fact that it's the final entry in the trilogy. It builds upon everything that brings the world of the Dragon Realms to life, and introduces fresh faces to the roster of unforgettable characters. All of this makes it extremely funny that there's a prototype where the NPCs swear at Spyro.

The discovery was stumbled upon within Project Deluge, which is a collective and collaborative effort of numerous researchers to contain and document early builds of video games for the PlayStation, PlayStation 2, Sega Saturn, and the Philips CD-i. It's initiatives like these that support the colourful cultural history of the industry, as oftentimes, companies won't have put in place any type of preservation plan for its previous projects. What? I didn't name any names.

"The work we're doing at the NVM and British Games Institute (BGI) isn't out of nostalgia," explained Ian Simons, director of culture for the National Videogame Museum, who told us why this industry has such an issue with keeping track of its history. "It's out of a concern for the future. We want to be able to inspire and educate new kinds of game-makers to make new kinds of games." Perhaps Iain wasn't thinking of this Spyro prototype which is extremely inappropriate for its intended audience. Regardless, we are extremely happy that this has been saved for fans, because it is so cursed.

"A large amount of the text dialogue is in a very incomplete state. Many lines of dialogue are also clearly placeholder strings presenting developer humour," read the notes for this entry. That's certainly one way to put it. Moneybags tells Spyro to "p*ss off" and demands that the player should "pay [him] fat duckets or the chick dies." The baby dragons that hatch from the eggs look super unsettling with glitchy textures. My favourite is easily the screenshot of dialogue with Bentley, who says: "At some point, I'll have to program that. For now, you're screwed."

Even better is that, according to Project Deluge's researchers, this is the one that was used in E3 2000, which means that if anything had gone awry, then these lines would have gone down in history in the darkest timeline for the family-friendly cartoon dragon.

Topics: News, Retro Gaming