NHL 2K Dreamcast : Pucking around with the prototypes
The first game in the NHL 2K series marked SEGA’s ambitious entry into the world of digital ice hockey, bringing refinement and a determination to shake up the established standards of sports games, much like all sports simulations bearing the 2K or SEGA SPORTS label. Released on the Dreamcast on February 9, 2000, in a video game landscape dominated by the same long-standing giants, NHL 2K stood out from the competition as an elegant, passionate, understated challenger ahead of its time.
Developed in 12 months by Black Box Games and supervised by Visual Concepts—already renowned for the exemplary work of its staff on NBA 2K and NFL 2K for Dreamcast—NHL 2K impressed with its realism, featuring detailed player models, ice with shifting reflections, and fluid animations. The latter were made possible thanks to the motion-capture expertise of The House of Move, a pioneering company in the field. Above all, NHL 2K stood out from the rest thanks to its incredible physics.
European pre-release cover
Unlike the more arcade-style titles of the era, NHL 2K offered a demanding simulation in which every pass, every shot, and every body check required precision and quick reflexes. The whole experience was immersed in an authentic soundscape, featuring the scrape of skates on the ice, the thud of players hitting the boards, the roar of the crowd, and commentary by sportscasters Bob Cole and Harry Neal, former hosts of TV’s Hockey Night in Canada.
Despite its qualities, NHL 2K would never receive the same level of recognition as its basketball or American football counterparts, likely due to its comparatively smaller amount of content. That didn’t stop SEGA from releasing its little brother, NHL 2K2, on July 11, 2002—still for the Dreamcast but this time developed by Treyarch.
The studio in Burnaby, British Columbia (Canada) reused NHL 2K’s proprietary engine during its aborted attempt to bring a 2K soccer game to the Dreamcast under the title Over The Top Soccer. This project eventually became Soccer Slam, which was released on PS2, Xbox, and GameCube in 2002.
NHL 2K laid the foundations for a franchise that would grow over subsequent console generations until the 2010s, when EA secured the exclusive rights to the National Hockey League license for use in video games!
NHL 2K Dreamcast Prototype Trailer (The Volt/Face Build)
NHL 2K on Dreamcast is like an old wooden collector’s hockey stick found in your parents’ attic: a bit worn, but full of history and carrying the soul of its owner.
The Face/Off Build: The January 4, 2000 Prototype
Analysis of the prototype reveals that the Black Box Games staff burned this red NHL 2K Dreamcast disc on January 4, 2000, at 1:43:16 PM. This beta predates the final U.S. release by 27 days, which was on January 31 at 9:41:00 PM. The facial rendering of some professional players is likely to terrify anyone trying this build, turning the game into a frightening yet humorous experience. Indeed, it’s not uncommon for hockey players to end up with their facial skin peeled off, evoking an iconic scene from the film Face/Off!
A build with debug symbols
Reviewing the prototype’s files, the one named DC00.ELF is surprising and will pique the interest of reverse engineers. It suggests that this version of NFL 2K, much like the recently released Dreamcast beta builds of Floigan Bros, Space Channel 5 Alpha, or the PlayStation 2 Fear Effect Inferno, includes Debug Symbols. In short, this file provides a way to access the game’s code. Other NHL 2K builds listed on this page also contain this peculiarity!
When the prototype is launched, only the Splash Screen showing the development studio Black Box Games with its logo, as well as the screen displaying copyright information for the National Hockey League (NHL) and the National Hockey League Players' Association (NHLPA), appear before reaching the title screen. The SEGA SPORTS branding screen and the one identifying True Motion as the image-smoothing technology used by BBG are missing, but most notably, the live-action hockey match sequence is absent.
Very blurry on the prototype
The logo and the ‘Presented By SEGA’ notice do not appear on the title screen. The copyright ‘(©) SEGA Enterprises, LTD., 1999’ indicates an incorrect year—it should be 2000. Furthermore, the prototype does not start any autoplay demo here without player intervention.
A black background replaces the Loading Screens. Similarly, the game freezes for a few seconds instead of displaying the ‘Simulating Season’ transition screen when moving from the Main Menu to the ‘Playoff’ Menu.
In the ‘Season’ and ‘Playoff’ modes, the developer options ‘Win This Game’ and ‘Lose This Game’ likely allowed the developers to design and implement the actual ‘Simulate Game’ feature that replaced them in the final release.
This athlete is skeletal
The teams in ‘Choose Teams’ do not display any on-screen statistics (Overall, Offense, Defense, Goaltending, Speed, Passing, Checking). Without a comparative baseline, it’s difficult to determine which team is the best among them all!
The prototype does not allow players to select a uniform other than the team’s standard one by clicking on ‘Choose Uniforms’. This option is not yet available.
The ‘Custom Players’ Menu for creating your dream avatar includes customization settings never seen before, or whose names changed during the development of NHL 2K. Some settings are also missing. Why is there a ‘Slot’ column with numbers going up to 40 in the prototype? Amusingly, the prototype allows players to create hockey players with extreme body mass indices, whereas the final version sticks to realistic data!
By setting up a game for the AI to play without human intervention, and pressing the button combination ‘Left or Right Trigger’ + ‘A’, ‘X’, or the D-Pad directions on any controller connected to the console, the prototype produces the same navigation sounds as those in the Menus. Yet another oddity not found in the released version of NHL 2K!
In this NHL 2K prototype, the cursor, which is white rather than black, directs attention to the puck carrier by indicating their identity with abbreviations (RD, LW, C, etc.). In the default setting of the final release, only the first name would be abbreviated. Additionally, the ‘Player Indicator’ option in ‘Game Settings’, which allows players to modify this aspect of the game (Name, Position, None), does not yet exist.
The game crashes when trying to view a gameplay sequence by manipulating the camera using the ‘Instant Replay’ option in the Pause Menu.
Castor Troy or Sean Archer ?
When the prototype fails to load the hockey players’ facial textures during a match, or when they had not yet been created by the game artists, as in the ‘Custom Players’ option, the game generates a default texture suggesting an inside joke among the developers. This temporary texture depicts players with their facial skin peeled off. This horror-movie-like feature led me to nickname this version of NHL 2K Dreamcast The Face/Off Build.
To think that only 27 days separate this prototype from the final version. Most of the work done on the game since the date of the build was focused on its presentation…
Menus: General Overview
The options and information displayed in the Menus (or elsewhere) in the beta use the same font as the Gold version but differ in size and weight (bold text).
Look like a Arcade game
The user interface (UI) never displays the possible interactions at the bottom of the menus, such as ‘Start Game’, ‘A Select’, and ‘B Cancel’. Occasionally, the prototype-specific visual prompt ‘Press Start To Enter Game’ appears.
Surprisingly, the button for going back, normally mapped to the controller’s ‘B’ button, varies from one Menu to another—sometimes it’s ‘A’, sometimes ‘X’…
This NHL 2K on Dreamcast includes specific menu navigation sound effects. It also produces a sound, a feedback, when the player confirms an action, which was removed in the commercial release of the game.
The selected option in a menu is highlighted in red rather than green.
The prototype returns directly to the previous Menu without prompting the player to confirm their decision when required, in the context of the current location—for example, in ‘Season’ mode: ‘Quit Season and lose changes? Yes No.
The evolution of Menus during a video game’s development isn’t usually what people enjoy most. Nevertheless, this aspect of game design provides an opportunity to appreciate the efforts made to make them more attractive and user-friendly!
The Main Menu
A quick game is usually started from the Main Menu by pressing the ‘Start’ button. This game mode, which is not available in the build, is provisionally called ‘Exhibition Game’ (like the first option selected in the Main Menu) before being renamed ‘New Game’ in the final release. That’s why this window displays the names of two hockey teams with their logos/emblems at the top of the screen. The prototype automatically sets them as the New York Rangers and the Vancouver Canucks, whereas the final version determines them randomly. Later, NHL 2K will display these teams first in the ‘Choose Team’ selector, regardless of the chosen game mode.
At this stage of development by Black Box Games, the ‘Credits’ option to view acknowledgments for those who contributed to NHL 2K and the option to configure the game according to personal preferences (‘Game Settings’) do not yet exist. However, ‘Game Settings’ is present in the ‘Exhibition’ mode, just as it was during the development of NFL 2K.
The Main Menu
The game crashes when attempting to manage NHL 2K Dreamcast save data on the memory card by going into ‘VMU Backup’. However, the ‘VMU Status’ window briefly appears before the crash.
When the differences in a prototype are already evident from the Main Menu, the same should be true for the rest of the game!
Comparative Screenshots
Here is a series of photos revealing the differences between this NHL 2K prototype and its final version; pictures can be worth a thousand words (on the left, the beta; on the right, the GOLD version):
The Title Screen
The Game Settings Menu
The Pause Menu
The Exhibition Menu
The Team Selector
The Game Stats Menu
In Game (default configuration)
At first glance, this NHL 2K prototype doesn’t look like much. But the more you examine it, the more mysteries it reveals!
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You can download this build of NFL 2K Dreamcast below
Other prototypes of the NHL 2K Dreamcast series games
No in-depth research has been conducted on the prototypes listed below. They are available for direct download.
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This article is dedicated to the betas of NHL 2K and NHL 2K2 on Dreamcast. It serves as a supplement to the article focused on the work of Visual Concepts, covering the making-of of their iconic titles, with exclusive testimonies that put them into perspective, as well as the Dreamcast prototypes of: Floigan Bros.: Episode 1 - NFL 2K1 - NCAA College Football 2K2 - NBA 2K - NBA 2K1 - NBA 2K2 - Fantasy Prototype (Proof of Concept) - NHL 2K - NHL 2K2 - World Series Baseball 2K2 - Over The Top Soccer (Unreleased) - ToeJam & Earl III Mission to Earth (Unreleased) - Ooga Booga. Discover the entire preservation project dedicated to this talented SEGA-affiliated studio on following page: [The Rise of Visual Concepts in the SEGA Era: Prototypes and Behind the Scenes of the Making of Their Dreamcast Classics]
Special thanks to:
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Hicks for proofreading and correcting the French text
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Vince for the English translation of the article
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Bo (Low Context Burning Rangers) for checking the cheats of the prototype examined on this page
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Megavolt85 for his expertise on .ELF files
Really special prototypes (big differences, early Builds, weird ones, etc.): Guilty Gear X (DC) - Dead or Alive 2 (DC) - Samba De Amigo (DC) - Virtual-On Oratorio Tangram (DC) - Spirit of Speed 1937 (DC) - Re-Volt (DC) - Phantasy Star Online (DC) - San Francisco Rush 2049 (DC) - Evil Twin: Cyprien's Chronicles (DC) - Toy Racer (DC) - Space Channel 5 (DC) - Sega Smash Pack Vol.1 (DC) - Red Dog (DC) - Propeller Arena (DC) - Half-Life (DC) - Jet Set Radio (DC) - Daytona USA 2001 (DC) - Floigan Bros. Episode 1 (DC) - NBA 2K1 (DC) - NFL 2K1 (DC) - NHL 2K (DC) - World Serie Baseball 2K2 (DC)
More than 300 prototypes have been digitized. You will find them available for free download in the section: [Dreamcast prototypes (and more) available for download]
NHL 2K on Dreamcast is like an old wooden collector’s hockey stick found in your parents’ attic: a bit worn, but full of history and carrying the soul of its owner.
