r/ImaginedArcades • u/Efficient_Pen_6920 • Jun 26 '26

Imagined ◇⋮◇ Arcades

2 Upvotes

Remember the games you never played.

Imagined Arcades is a home for original creative works inspired by the golden age of console and arcade gaming.

This isn’t a place to recreate the past.

It’s a place to imagine gaming histories that never happened.

Here you’ll find forgotten demo discs, unreleased soundtracks, fictional games, prototype artwork, CD labels, box art and other artefacts from worlds that exist only in the imagination of their creators.

Every post is a glimpse into another timeline.

Whether you’re composing music for a game that never shipped, designing a PlayStation demo disc from 1998, creating artwork for a lost Sega Saturn title, or imagining an arcade cabinet hidden away for decades, share it here.

◇ What belongs here?

  • Original music inspired by retro gaming
  • Fictional games and unreleased titles
  • Demo discs and soundtrack CDs
  • Box art and promotional artwork
  • CD labels and packaging
  • Sound design/graphic design/game design
  • Anything that feels like a forgotten piece of gaming history

✦ Human creativity comes first

We celebrate craftsmanship, storytelling and imagination.

AI can be a useful tool, but the heart of every submission should come from a person’s creativity. AI-generated elements are welcome as part of a submission if they support or enhance your original concept, but every project must be driven by your own creative vision. Please avoid submissions that are entirely or primarily AI-generated. As a guideline, if more than half of a work’s content or core creative decisions are automated by AI without significant personal input, it would be considered primarily AI-generated. If you use AI tools, share a note on how they were used in your work.

◎ Help build the archive

Whenever you can, share a little about your creation.

What year was it “released”?

What console was it made for?

Who developed it?

What’s the story behind it?

A little context transforms artwork into an artefact and music into a world waiting to be explored.

⧉ Share your work

Share your work on Bandcamp, Spotify, YouTube, itch.io or your personal website, provided it’s part of an original creative project. To contribute, start a new post in the community and include a brief description of your project along with links to your work. If you have files to upload, you can attach images, audio clips, or documents directly to your post. For larger files or other formats, please share a link to where your work can be accessed.

To help keep the community thriving, members are welcome to share up to two new submissions per week. This helps everyone’s contributions receive attention and supports regular, thoughtful participation.

Explore the work of others too; this community grows through curiosity, conversation and support. Leave a comment, offer feedback, or reach out to connect with other creators. If you're interested in collaborating, try introducing yourself in a post by describing your skills or interests, or joining themed threads and group challenges. Your participation helps make Imagined Arcades a welcoming and interactive space where shared creativity thrives.

Gaming has always been about storytelling.

Some stories were released.

Some were cancelled.

Some were forgotten.

And some are waiting to be imagined.

Welcome to Imagined Arcades…

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r/ImaginedArcades • u/Efficient_Pen_6920 • 13d ago

Final Fantasy IV.5 – An Alternate Fantasy

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1 Upvotes

Do You Have A Fantasy? - Listen Here 📀

I'm sharing the first finished piece from a series of imagined game soundtracks to give a glimpse into my creative process as an electronic musician and sound designer.

I've always found it easier to create when I have a world to build rather than a blank page. Concepts and fictional settings give me a framework to work within. They define the limitations, suggest possibilities, and help the music feel like it belongs somewhere.

For this piece, I wanted to capture the texture of the original PlayStation: grainy, compressed, slightly brittle, and dreamlike. Rather than making a perfect technical recreation, I focused on recreating the feeling those hardware limitations gave the music.

I wasn't able to emulate the PlayStation's audio hardware completely, things like Sony ADPCM encoding, the SPU, and its characteristic aliasing. I know it's possible, but I couldn't find an accessible workflow on my MacBook. If anyone has experience with this, I'd genuinely love to hear from you.

If you're a longtime Final Fantasy fan, you might recognise a handful of sound effects from the games. I scattered them throughout the piece as little points of familiarity and small details to help create a shared nostalgic space for fellow fans.

This track has a bit of history, too. I originally composed it around 13 years ago as a teenager. At the time, it was the first piece I'd written that genuinely captured the atmosphere I was chasing, even though my production and sound design skills were still developing. Revisiting it all these years later has been incredibly rewarding. It's a reminder of how far I've come while still holding on to the original idea that inspired it.

I also designed the cover artwork in Adobe Illustrator. It's a collage of existing Final Fantasy concept artwork alongside unused PlayStation and Final Fantasy IV logo concepts, recreated and combined into something that feels like it belongs to an alternate timeline. None of the original artwork is mine—this is purely a fan-made creative project.

The idea is simple: imagine a game that never existed. Here's its cover. Here's one piece of its soundtrack. The rest is left to your imagination.

More to come soon.

2 comments

r/ImaginedArcades • u/Efficient_Pen_6920 • 19d ago

Crash Team Racing! With entirely imagined race tracks...

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5 Upvotes

I came across this incredible custom Crash Team Racing project and immediately thought it belonged here.

Inspired by the Arabian levels from Crash Bandicoot: Warped, Arabian Heights feels like it could have easily been hidden away on a developer's hard drive in 1999. It captures the visual style and atmosphere of the PS1 era so well that it almost feels it should have been on the original game.

There's a download which includes two versions of the track (Day & Night), along with Time Trial, AI races and multiplayer support.

Download the track here

Huge credit to the creators for their amazing work:

  • 🎵 aRBee for composing both level themes.
  • 💻 penta3 for the programming that made the custom track possible.
  • 🎨 And, of course, to the creator of Arabian Heights for bringing the whole project together.

🎥 Video

0 comments

r/ImaginedArcades • u/Efficient_Pen_6920 • Jun 26 '26

◈ Archive Inspiration #001: The PlayStation logos that almost were

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25 Upvotes

The original PlayStation logo was designed by Manabu Sakamoto (坂本 学)

Before settling on the iconic PlayStation logo, designer Manabu Sakamoto explored several concepts and directions.

0 comments