In the mid-90s, with the Saturn bombing and the rapidly changing video game landscape, Sega rolled the dice and made a few risky bets. One of them was, uh, spending $3 million to make an adult-oriented FMV game called Sacred swimming pool, that’s too bad it was boxed before it was released.
However, now, in 2022, we can play it! Thanks to Games of Alexandriawho not only grasps the game but also offer it to download and play on the emulator, we can all have a chance, if not like, at least experience This lost piece of video game history.
Sacred swimming pool started growing in 1996, when the FMV craze had subsided, so by the time it was ready for public screenings and about to be released, the market’s appetite for the genre – thanks into an endless parade of low-effort bullshit – turned sour.
While targeted at adults and described as “erotic thriller,“ The game doesn’t have any footage at all sex. BILLIONno full nudity here, just some “revealing” and “revealing women’s clothing,“ although this was enough to allow Sega .’s marketing team to focus on the game’s “beautiful creatures” in the trailer.
Sacred swimming pool is in development for Saturn, PC, PlayStation and Mac, but will never be released on any machine. After a performance at E3 in 1996, well received by the press, “The game kept missing its release date and quietly disappeared from the schedule in mid-1997. SegaSoft abandoned the game and no amount of money or parties could fix it. “
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Over the course of 25 years, almost everything the public has ever seen or known about the game, until Games of Alexandria managed to get the “alpha build” of Sacred swimming pool for all its platforms. They arrived from David Gray, a former game production associate, who was given the discs as a “parting gift” when he left SegaSoft in 1999. Those builds are now available for downloadbut if you just want to watch a small clip instead, here are the first few minutes of the game in action:
To read more about the game, its development, and how to get these copies, you should definitely check it out Alexandria’s game featuregoes into much more detail – like Hole playing at the parties, and Hollywood veterans assisting in the production – than you’d expect for a relatively obscure title like this.
