The gaming sleuths at the Library of Congress have unearthed an interesting bit of gaming trivia; a copy of an unreleased Duke Nukem game for PSP.

Duke Nukem Forever is the game that got most of the attention, but a few month before Forever's release, Deep Silver and Frontline Studios put out Duke Nukem: Critical Mass, a platforming shooter for Nintenodo’s DS handheld, but the DS wasn't the only system schedule to get that title. While performing an inventory of recently acquired video games, a moving image technician at the Library of Congress discovered the original source disc for the PSP version of the game that was never released.

"Since 2006, the Moving Image section of the Library of Congress has served as the custodial unit for video games," technician David Gibson wrote on the Library of Congress' website, "In this capacity, we receive roughly 400 video games per year through the Copyright registration process, about 99% of which are physically published console games.

"Several months ago, while performing an inventory of recently acquired video games, I happened upon a DVD-R labeled Duke Nukem: Critical Mass (PSP). My first assumption was that the disc, like so many others we have received, was a DVD-R of gameplay. However, a line of text on the Copyright database record for the item intrigued me. It reads: Authorship: Entire video game; computer code; artwork; and music."

You can read Gibson's entire post about how he hacked into the disc and discovered the unreleased game on the Library of Congress' blog; it's an interesting tale.

[Source: Library of Congress via Polygon]

Out Take

This isn't a monumental find, but it's an interesting story about a relatively unknown game, and it makes me wonder what other gaming gems might be locked away in the Library of Congress waiting to be discovered.