It Came from the Desert

It Came from the Desert is an unreleased Sega Mega Drive game developed by Cinemaware, and was due to be published by Electronic Arts in 1992. Though it shares a similar intro, it is in fact an entirely different game from other versions of It Came from the Desert released for the IBM PC, Amiga and TurboGrafx-CD, being a top-down action game rather than a point and click adventure. According to programmer Matthew Harmon (brought in from New World Computing), the game was "99.99%" complete before cancellation, citing a rare bug which caused the game to crash as the reason the game was not complete. He also suggests that the reason the game was axed was due to EA's policy to concentrate more on sports titles (though it quickly backed away from this strategy). The game was shown at the Winter CES 1992. Cinemaware released the "99.99%" finished prototype ROM of the game as freeware on 2001-12-17.