#press cds

Hi-Res Disc

This disc has some high resolution artwork and nothing else.

There's a few well known renders on here, as well as some more obscure ones. For example, have you ever seen this one of Spyro's superfly ability?

Here's one of Spyro taken shortly before he runs me over with his car. For some reason, the file is called "SNABISCO".

The images are all in TIF format, which means sometimes there's extra layers in the images, including additional transparency layers hinting at earlier designs. Take a look and see what you can find!

You can get this asset disc for yourself here.

Press Disc

Next up is the Spyro 2 "press disc"... both of the discs are usually referred to as press discs, but this one is explicitly called the "press disc", so I apologise for how confusing that name is.

There's a lot of weird corporate stuff on this disc, which I'll skip over in this post. There's also a handful of written documents in here. There's nothing massively new in any of them, but I do like this claim about Spyro 2's powerups:

Introduction of new powerup system for special powers on each level: superfly, supercharge, superbounce, superspit, supershield and superfreeze

Internally they called superflame "superspit". Something I didn't know was that they call the invincibility powerup "supersheild", though in hindsight I guess it's not a surprise.

The bulk of this disc is images - artwork and screenshots of the game. Let's briefly go over the renders first, because they're interesting.

So there's this horrifying unfinished one. I don't want to look at this one for much longer so I won't say much about it:

This disc also has a photoshop image file (RUN.TIF) which has been named with the wrong file extension, for some reason. You can open it in supporting image editing programs to reveal what it really looks like:

There's a small handful of level renders, too:

A lot of the screenshots on this disc have been seen before, so much of this is nothing new. A lot seem to be totally unique, though, or at the very least were not used very often anywhere else, so they've got a handful of surprises to show us.

Every screenshot is identified as S2SSX.TIF where X is a number from 1 to 190. 185 screenshots are on this disc - though screenshots 4, 5, 6, 7 and 103 (???) are seemingly missing.

This starts off with a few renders I've not seen used very often. Nothing too special, but nice to see more of Summer Forest at this stage:

Oh, but what's this? There seems to be something missing here. Where's the Colossus portal?

It seems to be over here. I like where they moved it to, putting it right next to the Idol Springs portal would have been a little boring.

Elora's in a slightly different spot in some of these. Rather than standing in the doorway to the castle, she's here to greet you as soon as you leave Glimmer, just like in the cutscene.

Moneybags is also here to greet us, for some reason. It seems he'd be the one to teach Spyro to glide - a bit out of character for him, so I can see why they'd change this.

Glimmer's skybox - and I think some of its textures and lighting - seem to be different. It gives the level a really strange vibe, but maybe a little too gloomy for the first level.

The HUD looks a little different in this version. It's subtle, but the gem counter icon is a bit more rounded. I think the earliest demo had this oddity, too.

The first of the Idol Springs screenshots slaps us over the face with this bizarre structure. Although it may not be obvious at first glance, nothing like this doorway exists in the final game. This building is where Spyro plays the light up boxes game, but usually the only way to enter is through an underwater tunnel. This easy entrance was replaced with a totally flat wall.

And here's the end of the level, in case you thought that building in the previous screenshot was this one.

We get another view of the doorway here, as well as a strange grating that the river passes through.

These two screenshots of the hula girl area are a little weird. It looks like Spyro's trying to speak to this guy, and there seems to be some sort of step behind Spyro in the first image.

Originally, the Hockey counters in Colossus were just coloured pucks.

Spyro 1's exit vortex pad - also seen in early demos of Spyro 2 - makes an appearance!

I've ran out of space for more images in this post, so I'm posting the rest in Part 2!

This ladder in Sunny Beach provides an interesting shortcut to players that have the climbing ability unlocked. Completely defeats the main objective of the level?

This level is also missing a bridge. Later builds would turn this into a slim rocky bridge before it became the larger bridge with walls down the sides that the final has.

So, Autumn Plains. This archway's equipped with an extra platform with a gem on it, which I think we saw in one of the preview builds too.

Aqueduct.

The lava lizards minigame used to show how many lizards were left to find. God knows where Spyro thinks he's going in that second screenshot.

The old exit vortex makes a reappearance.

Some of the screenshots are really, really weird. I suspect they used some sort of tool to produce them, rather than being in standard gameplay.

This one's cute.

There's a few of these where Spyro seems to have 0 gems despite not being at the start of the level, which lends credence to the idea that they probably controlled Spyro's position and camera angle in these screenshots somehow.

The icons make it seem like these speedway collectables have already been obtained, but the rest of the image suggests otherwise.

A very early Shady Oasis with a different colour scheme, skybox, and without its fog.

These screenshots appear to show the same point in time at two different angles! Very interesting. Maybe they could freeze the gameplay to take a screenshot?

Ugly, ugly HUD icons. The latter two look like the same frame, again.

Very charming. Was that satyr counter in the final?

Okay, that's all I'm covering today! Be sure to check the discs out for yourself!

You can get the hi-res disc here, and the press disc here.

Power Source E3 1998 Press Kit CD 1

This one's pretty great; despite being a broad press kit intended to hold press info on all of the PlayStation games shown at E3 that year, Spyro gets a hell of a lot of content all to itself. Press release documents, a tonne of screenshots of the earliest known build of Spyro 1, lots of artwork renders, and some unusual screenshots showing areas of the game that don't seem to exist in the final product, this disc is full of early Spyro content. It even contains some metadata showing the original filenames of a few of the included images, which is pretty interesting (to me, at least).

Spyro the Dragon Press Kit CD

The official press CD, included with Spyro 1's official press kit. Lots of artwork renders (many of them very high resolution), a few screenshots from multiple different points in development, and plenty of press release documents on here.

Sony Autumn / Winter Collection '99 Press CD 3

The only press disc we currently have for Spyro 2. More of the usual stuff, including a few nice high quality renders, and plenty of early screenshots.

Sony E3 2000 Press Disc 1 (PlayStation Update)

A SCEE press disc for E3 2000, coinciding with the reveal of Spyro 3 - this time, Spyro takes up much less space, with this disc only including a few press documents and some renders.

Sony E3 2000 Artwork Disc

This artwork disc is another E3 2000 disc containing only a small handful of Spyro 3 things - no press release documents this time, just a few of the Pre-E3 screenshots.

ECTS 2000 Press Disc