In the mid-’90s, with the Saturn bombing and the video game landscape changing rapidly, Sega rolled the dice and made some risky bets. One of which was, um, pouring $3 million into the development of an adult-oriented FMV game called Sacred Pools this was so bad that it ended up being thrown out before it was even released.
But now, in 2022, we can play it! Thanks to Games Alexandriawho not only got hold of the game but made it available to download and play on emulators, we can all get a chance, if not to enjoy it, then at least experience this lost piece of video game history.
Sacred Pools went into development in 1996, when the FMV craze was already fading, and by the time it was ready for its public screenings and imminent release, the market’s appetite for the genre – thanks to an endless parade of low-effort dog shit – was sour.
Although the game was aimed at adults and billed as an “adult thriller,” it contained no explicit footage sexually; No full nudity was shown, just some “racy” costumes and “barely clad women”, although this was enough to allow Sega’s marketing team to do so focus on the game’s “beautiful creatures” in a trailer.
Sacred Pools was in development for Saturn, PC, PlayStation and Mac but was never released on any of them. After a preview at E3 in 1996, which was panned by the press and arrived at the end of the FMV craze, “the game repeatedly missed its release date and quietly disappeared from the schedule in mid-1997. SegaSoft abandoned the game and neither money nor parties could fix it.”
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For 25 years, that was pretty much all the public had ever seen or known about the game until Games Alexandria managed to snag “alpha builds”. Sacred Pools for all its platforms by David Gray, a former Associate Producer on the game, who received the discs as a “parting gift” when he left SegaSoft in 1999. These builds are now available for downloadbut if you’d rather watch some footage instead, here are the first few minutes of the game in action:
To learn more about the game, its development and obtaining these copies, you should definitely take a look Gaming Alexandria special featurewhich goes into much more detail – how Hole plays at parties and helps Hollywood veterans with the production – than one would expect from a relatively obscure title like this.
