Dummied Out / Adventure Games

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• This article details some things that have been dummied out of Sierra's later adventure games. The resource.aud files in the voiced games tend to contain unused lines, including the occasional outtake: here is a list of unused voice clips in King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow.
• The Humongous Entertainment Adventure Games had some dummied out content that could be accessed in several ways. These included some unused music, unused cut scenes, and unused in-house Level Editors the developers would use in the arcade styled spinoffs. Some of the cut scenes, however, you'd have to wonder why the heck they even exist. One of the unused Freddi Fish cut scenes had Luther being violently eaten by a Psycho Electric Eel.
• Hypnospace Outlaw: The game files contain alternate cutscenes depending on the number of certain characters banned before the Mindcrash, listing either six, five, four or three fatalities. Since it's only possible to ban Zane and Carl Parker before they die, the cutscene listing three fatalities goes unused.
• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis has several items and locations that are either largely modified from the versions shown in packaging and screenshots or inaccessible but still present in the game files, which can be seen here.
• In LucasArts' Loom, an early screenshot showed a room in the Glassmakers' City with three giant sandglasses, two of which had run out and were sealed up; the last one was open at the top and a worker was pouring sand into it to keep it running. The three sandglasses of course represent the three Shadows, of which the first two have long since passed, and the third is imminent. The room was ultimately cut to save disk space. The sandglasses can still be glimpsed in the 16-color version, in the wide shot of the city (though they were painted out in the VGA upgrade).
• Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge also had some content removed before release. For instance, after Guybrush blows up LeChuck's fortress, he and Wally were going to land on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Wally loses his monocle and falls into the sea. The scene was cut because even in a game chock-full of sociopathically cruel yet absurdly hilarious puzzle solutions, this was felt to be beyond the pale. The background which was to feature the raft was entirely redrawn and reused for another scene, but the game files still refer to it as the "raft" room.
  • Also of note are several rooms cut from LeChuck's Fortress, which presumably contained extra puzzles, including a voodoo shrine/potions laboratory, closeups of the desk and throne in LeChuck's office, and a closeup shot of Zombie LeChuck in all his g(l)ory. There was also a much more elaborate alternate version of the underground tunnels beneath Phatt Island. The filenames of these unused rooms were embedded in a pre-release demo of MI2, but their art assets were not revealed until the 2010 Updated Re-release included some of this cut material in its concept art gallery.
• Myst has an unused screen showing the small checkerboard in Sirrus' room in the Mechanical Age opened to show a music box mechanism. This was finally implemented in 2014 in realMyst: Masterpiece Edition.
• Initial plans for the Haven portion of Myst IV: Revelation included a puzzle with animal tracks, noises and food preferences, but it fell through due to time and budget constraints. Some of the clues for this vanished puzzle are still to be found within the game, but aren't any use, aside from confirming that Achenar's got sloppy handwriting.
• Quest for Glory V has several bits of dummied out content:
  • Multiplayer capability. It was enabled for one of the "sneak peek" demo versions of the game, but because of the disbanding of Yosemite Entertainment, never released for the finished project.
  • Bows. Some of the NPCs (notably Elsa von Spielburg) use bows, but the player cannot. Arrows can be found on dead enemies, but they are only able to be sold. There's a mod around that enables the player to use a bow, albeit with animations missing.
  • There are references in dialogue to the large lake at the center of Marete, but you cannot actually access it in-game. Presumably it was a sidequest that was scrapped because of a lack of time and money.
• In Riven, there used to be a book press on one of the islands. However, it was dummied out of the final cut of the game because the developers had no time to implement it before the holidays. If you snoop around in the game's files, you can find movie files of this press moving up and down (presumably when clicked upon), and there's actually still one screen in the game where you can still see the very top of the press (the editors didn't even notice it, so it never got dummied out of that screen), but it's barely noticeable unless you're specifically looking for it.
• In beta versions of Riven: The Sequel to Myst, there was an operable book press near the boiler on Book Assembly Island. The screen containing it still exists in the game, but was made inaccessible because playtesters mistook it for a puzzle. It can still be seen in the background of some other screens. Gehn's lab on the same island has five drawers, of which only the top one opens, revealing a collection of different eggs. An unused screen (without opening/closing animations) reveals that the drawer below this one contains butterflies.
• The Secret of Monkey Island:
  • The game features a parody of this with the now-legendary "stump joke", where the player character can find a stump in the woods with a hole underneath it that will lead into what he describes as "a tunnel that leads onto a system of catacombs". It's impossible to enter, though, because the game will ask for several disks (with absurdly high disk numbers) that didn't ship with the game, and the player character just gives up and assumes he can't get to that part of the game. Many players didn't get the joke, though, and called LucasArts about their missing disks, so they eventually removed it in the Amiga and CD versions of the game, making the stump joke a gag about dummied out content that in itself became dummied out. References to the stump joke can still be found in other games, such as Monkey Island 2 (where you can call LucasArts' hint line and ask about the stump), The Curse of Monkey Island (where you finally get to see the other side of the stump) Grim Fandango and Psychonauts.
  • The Secret of Monkey Island also originally featured a closeup of Spiffy, the dog that Guybrush can talk to in the SCUMM Bar. It was cut to save disk space, but ended up on the back of the game box, confusing the heck out of many players. In 2009, the Updated Re-release actually created a brand-new closeup of Spiffy for the enhanced-graphics mode.
• The VGA remake of Space Quest 1 had some graphics pasted over the unauthorized ZZ Top cameo, which could be restored by deleting a few files.
• Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers
  • Two games are dummied out in the Software Excess bin — the Leisure Suit Larry spoof Dacron Danny Does Dirty Deeds in the Dark Wearing Drip-dry Duds, and Stunt Flyer, referenced in-game on the Roger Wilco Jr. disk, possibly a reference to Stunt Driver.
  • In the CD version, the Room Removed For Legal Reasons is a showcase of graphics that may have caused legal trouble for Sierra at one point. The room is inaccessible without a fan made patch, and refers to the original Quest for Glory I logo, Hero's Quest, Earl Sinclair's cameo in the VGA remake of Quest for Glory I, ZZ Top, appearing in the first releases of Space Quest I EGA and VGA versions, the Droids R Us logo from Space Quest I before becoming Droids-B-Us, the Radioshock store logo from previous versions of Space Quest IV before being changed to Hz. So Good, and the Slime Chow and Slug Chow icons from two death sequences from earlier versions of Space Quest IV, featuring a red and white checkered pattern resembling the Purina logo.
• Thimbleweed Park originally was going to have a quest involving the security camera to the convenience store, that would've been used as evidence for the murder. It involved the whiskey bottle found at the crime scene and the BetaMax tape found in the dispenser outside the store. This quest was cut for time, and so while the items are still there, they are a Useless Item: The bottle can be shown to the clerk at the store, but nothing will come of it.
• During Season 2, Episode 5 of The Walking Dead, there originally was an option to shoot Mike, should you not decide to drop your weapon or alert Kenny or Jane, which would end up killing him. While not accessible in the PC or the Xbox 360 versions, this option was available for a short period of time in the PlayStation 3 version, until it was eventually patched via hotfix. However, the choice could still be retrieved via game files, meaning it's still there, just inaccessible.

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