Juego Fighting Force -ntsc-u- -slus-00433- May 2026

In late 1997, just months before Eidos Interactive would publish Fighting Force on the PlayStation, a small internal team at Core Design—tasked with a controversial port of the arcade-style brawler—created a regional test build. This was not the final European or North American release. This was , a forgotten NTSC-U prototype internally code-named Juego (Spanish for "game").

The environment was haunting. Floodwaters rose in real-time, forcing players to jump between sinking subway cars. Enemies weren't mercenaries but —shadowy, translucent versions of the player characters that mimicked their moves but spoke in reversed, garbled voice lines. Juego Fighting Force -NTSC-U- -SLUS-00433-

Juego contained a level cut from every official release: . It was level 0.5, wedged between the streets and the factory. In late 1997, just months before Eidos Interactive

The menu music was a dissonant, slowed-down version of the final game's theme. Selecting a character—Hawk, Mace, Smasher, or Alana—did not start the bank heist level. Instead, a hidden debug terminal appeared, demanding a "Sequence Code." The environment was haunting

The screen then displayed a 3D model of the PlayStation's CPU melting. The text appeared. The game then forced a hard lock, requiring a power cycle. Upon reboot, the Juego disc could never be read again by that console. It would spin, click three times, and show the "Please insert PlayStation CD-ROM" error forever.