Way back in 2013, I wrote up a couple of articles that detailed the history of unreleased arcade games that were in the works at one time by Midway. Similar posts had been created for Atari and Taito, so Midway was just as deserving of that attention.
In researching the 2nd unreleased prototypes post, I was able to talk with Brian Colin, an artist and game designer who had worked at Midway since the early 80’s. His name is attached to a variety of games you should recognize and have likely played: Spy Hunter, Discs of Tron, Rampage, Arch Rivals, Xenophobe and more.
In the revelations of that post, Brian brought up several games that I had never even seen mentioned on unreleased game lists, but one really stood out to me – a laserdisc choose-your-own adventure style game by the name of The Spectre Files. I played a few FMV adventure games back in my day (TBH, I never really understood why everyone was so into Myst…Return To Zork was a far more entertaining game), so seeing something that would have been a predecessor to those kinds of 90’s games – and in arcades – was quite something.

Fast forward to 2016, and news came along that Mr. Colin along with Galloping Ghost Productions was looking to resurrect and restore The Spectre FIles project so that the gamers of today could enjoy a title that otherwise would have been lost to time. If you would like to read an extremely detailed history of how the game came into being, then I would highly recommend this article over at The Daily Grindhouse
This wouldn’t be an easy or quick process – while the footage had been found, the script and some other assets were missing. But with some patience and effort, the reconstruction process went

http://arcadeheroes.com