A super cool discovery has just been made about Spyro: Year of the Dragon! This awesome game has a prototype version that was found, and it gives us a sneak peek into all the cool changes it went through right before it was released.

So, this rad person on Twitter and YouTube, @Hwd405, spilled the beans about the ‘September 4th, 2000 build of Spyro: Year of the Dragon.’ In a nutshell, they shared tons of deets about this version of the game. Imagine finding out about new music, levels for Sheila that we’ve never seen before, and a bunch of other neat stuff. The game’s like a treasure chest of surprises in this build, and you can check it out in all its glory on Hidden Palace.

Now, let’s clear up a bit of confusion. There’s a debate about when this game version was published. According to Hidden Palace, it was cooked up on September 4, 2000 (you know, from the info in the save file). But hold on, there were other versions floating around at the same time, making things a bit puzzling. The key takeaway? This game version is like a time capsule from a couple of months before it officially hit the shelves on October 10, 2000.

Now, brace yourself for some surprises because the game got a makeover right before its big debut. Picture this: changes to the soundtrack! Yup, there are tracks that got the boot or got swapped out for different ones in the final game. Thanks to Hwd405, we can actually listen to the tunes that didn’t make the final cut, like the Spider Town, Crawdad Farm, and Starfish Reef level themes. The audio dialogue in Spyro: Year of the Dragon got a major glow-up too. Some lines were switched up or straight-up vanished in the final game. If you’re a Spyro superfan, you might catch some of these subtle changes. For example, all of Sparx’s audio dialogue and most of Bianca’s lines went MIA, one of Hunter’s messages seems like a behind-the-scenes recording, and a bunch of characters talk about things that got changed later in the game.

We’re just scratching the surface here, peeps. There’s a boatload of awesomeness in this game build that we can’t squeeze into one story. Head over to the Hidden Palace page for the full scoop if you’re itching to dive into all the details!