A 2001 demo from an unknown Gex Jr game has just popped up online

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Surprise Gex fans! A demo – seemingly from a 2001 Gex Jr game – has popped up online.

With very little else to go on – we don’t know where the demo comes from, who’s uploaded it, where it was found, or even if it’s legitimate, of course – all we have is the description on a YouTube video that states it’s “a short demo of the unreleased and unannounced game Gex Jr. for the PlayStation”. It also alleges that “this demo was made by ImageBuilder and is dated January 25, 2001”.

Crucially, the poster held off from April 1 to share the video, perhaps to mitigate those “is this a joke???” responses that plague every news story published on April 1. Here, check it out for yourself, but at just 30 seconds long, don’t get your hopes too high: 

The only other hint we have is that the demo was seemingly found on an old CD-R, as a file on an archive.org page – allegedly that of the demo itself – says “the CD-R this demo was dumped from was in very poor condition so some errors DO exist in this dump. Despite these errors, this dump was functional in all emulators tested”. 

The discovery comes a year after Square Enix renewed its rights to the 90s platformer, although we’ve yet to see anything – formally or otherwise – that hints that a new installment may be in development.

This is not the first time a demo from a canceled game has popped up online, of course. As Ali summarized for us at the time, last year a playable version of the canceled GoldenEye 007 Xbox 360 remaster appeared online (opens in new tab), mere days after gameplay footage from it was shared on YouTube.

A two-hour long-play of the remastered game (opens in new tab), the demo showed off the entire – and pretty much complete – game with updated graphics, and while the YouTuber behind that video held off from publicly sharing a link to play the game, that didn’t prevent loads of curious 007 fans from going looking for it. It’s thought the game was canceled because Microsoft and Activision had been unable to reach a deal with Nintendo to formally remaster and sell the N64 game, despite developer Rare’s considerable efforts to modernize it.

There’s still a lot to get excited about in gaming this year. Here are the upcoming games of 2022 (opens in new tab) we really just can’t wait for.