In the early 2000s, there was a rush of kart-based racing games, all of which hoped to capitalize on the success of popular titles like Mario Kart 64 and Crash Team Racing.
Konami's Woody Woodpecker Racing was no exception to this, borrowing essentially the same formula but instead using the Universal mascot and his various animal companions. The game came out for the PlayStation 1, PC, and Game Boy Color in 2000, but it also had an unreleased port for the Sega Dreamcast that was announced and then quietly cancelled for unknown reasons.
Recently, thanks to the hard work of the YouTuber and Digital Games Curator Andrew Borman (@Borman18) and the game developer @frioglobal1, Dreamcast fans have been able to take a glimpse at what that game would have been like, with the talented pair managing to compile the source files into a playable format.
As @frioglobal1 details, the process to get it up and running wasn't exactly straightforward. He had to analyze the code closely to identify which tools (SDK, compilers, etc) the developers had used while making the game. Upon doing this, he was able to discover that the developers had utilized the official SEGA Katana SDK Release 10, and the MetroWerks Codewarrior C/C++ compiler.
Fortunately, he had a Katana on deck with SDK 10 installed and was able to import all the appropriate source files into a new Codewarior project and tweak the compiler options. Then, after a lot more work, which also included extracting the audio from the PlayStation 1 version to replace the lack of sound, he was finally able to produce a playable GDI, which Borman demonstrated in a video above.
It's a fantastic bit of preservation work for a title that could have easily been overlooked and forgotten. If you want to see more unreleased prototypes and footage of cancelled games, we recommend checking out Borman's YouTube channel PtoPOnline.